John Pai was born in Seoul, Korea in 1937 and moved to the United States in 1949. He graduated from the Pratt Institute and at the age of 27 became the youngest person to be appointed a professor there. He has been working continuously as a sculptor. In the 1950s and ‘60s, there were numerous modern masters in all artist fields working in New York and for Pai who was a student during this period, the city proved to be the most ideal environment in which he could learn and absorb everything. Choosing first to major in industrial design, Pai was deeply interested in a basic yet comprehensive coursework in three-dimensional design, which was founded on Bauhaus principles and focused on abstraction, visual analysis, and form and structure.

After graduation, he was deeply moved by the constructivist work of Theodore Rosjak, a master of welded sculpture, and subsequently worked for two years as his assistant. Constructivism is the most notable tendency in Pai’s early work, and also played an important role in training the artist to comprehend the structures of objects by examining and analyzing them into basic elements. Through this method, he acquired the ability to work with abstract concepts in both his art and scholarship, breaking away from preconception in order to find elements common in all things. Vaguely resonant with the image of nature seen from the perspective of science, his artistic approach – breaking things down into minute units and reconstructing them – is a search to understand the limited inner world of the self through conceptual basics.

It could be said that Pai’s structural objects, composed of abstract forms and individual building blocks, make familiar what we are not familiar, and incorporate what we don’t know in the world of which the artist is aware. The artist’s way of thinking discovers a certain abstractness shared by all objects through simple, repetitive acts, and expresses a certain movement through immobile objects. Like Bach’s music, Pai’s artistic attitude possesses a structural clarity, but also chooses the ineffable quality of abstract concepts. John Pai continues to tune time and space with his own brand of obscurity and clear structure.