The beguiling abstract sculptures that Chun Kook-kwang made during his too-short career don’t quite fit that well-worn cliché of art writing: the historical work that “looks like it was made today.” Taking the form of eccentrically gridded objects or piles of a single material, they are unmistakably products of their era, the 1970s and ’80s. But their inventiveness, their candor, and their vast allusive range should nevertheless send competitive-minded sculptors rushing back to their studios.

Born in 1945, Chun was at the center of the art action in ’70s Seoul. He helped found a collective called