When the world inevitably lacks something, we cry out. Therefore, art, being born of the womb that is this world, will also inevitably lack something. Art and painting is a proof that life/death in the world is, in fact, absence, that the world goes in a state of life and death. Ultimately, art/painting evidences itself as a form of absence, the state of being born to a unkind fate. As such, painting is a process of proof of absence for this world, the womb, the source, and the subject. And only when it becomes such a process is it a testament, a revelation. The true efficacy of art and painting only arises through such wordplay. If not, what is the use of painting?
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Lee Je's Buoyance is a painting that represents the situation of the artist herself. To begin with an examination of the painting process, she paints two to three base layers, and she just applies more paint without an intent to paint anything in particular. At first, she paints in broad strokes, and then with a smaller brush, she applies paint in smaller strokes as if making indents. In other places, she piles on paint, such that the brushstrokes leave behind thick globs of paint. Shortly after, she again dabs a paint-laden brush here and there, while in other places, presses down a brush with such a hard pressure as if to crush the canvas. But that is not all. She twirls the brush and sprays paint upon the painting. Then, before the paint properly dries, a score is drawn across the surface with a stick-like object, which causes a scar that opens up the base layers. Her methodological madness does not end there. Before the globs of paint have dried, she rubs a dry brush across the top center of the painting, thus exposing the base layer, and swiftly paints an image of her foot. Facing the painting, she leaves behind a vertical patch that has been rubbed clean beside her left foot, and beside her right foot, she leaves behind a coarse horizontal patch that has also been rubbed clean.
In this respect, this painting can be seen from two different angles. (1) Rather than painting something, she has erased something. She paints, scrapes, mashes, and rubs. At the end, she paints a foot on top of her work for some reason. The foot stands on top of the painting. But, that foot (what if it were a hand?) is painted over the traces of brushstroke/paint rubbed away, and it therefore resonates. The foot does not stand upon the ground, but rather it glides, like a child who has stepped upon a sheet of ice for the first time. (2) The painting therefore appears as if a carefully painted work of art, being rubbed, squashed, and scratched, that has been marred by the foot. Again, we might ask, would it have been different if the foot were a hand? The answer would be that the foot, antithetical to the hand, threatens the fruits of the artist's hard labor. As such, Buoyance is a self-portrait. The foot in this painting appears as if it has just ventured into the painting field, or painting bog, or to have just barely escaped after struggling in this bog. But words alone cannot explain the painting. The painting is either this or that: it is like this, but it is also like that, and it is not like this, and also not like that. The artist seeks to invite the world into the painting, but the painting rejects the world. The world mocks the painting. The painting even rejects its womb, the artist, and seeks to stand on its own. The artist is out of her mind, and so is the painting. No matter how much inspirational imagination and hard work the artist pours into the painting, it always exceeds the artist. The artist falls short of the painting.
Her body belongs to the city, and her heart encounters the daily life of the city, the moments of the city, the space of the city, the things of the city, and the people of the city. She sleeps and wakes in the city, she wanders the city, swims the city, drowses off in the city, and dreams in the city. The artist is a ghost that roams the city. For example, as in Road, the object-sneaker that caught the eye of an artist as she wandered a residential neighborhood without anything of note. Punctum, the scars from a landscape. She brandishes her brush and lays out the ground upon a canvas, and she erects a vertical pillar that appears to be a telephone pole. She then lays out a walkway, erects several buildings, parks a few cars, and beneath the pole, she places a pair of sneakers. The sneakers in the painting are a "retired object", retired from their original role, that of protecting their owner's feet and the social function of representing economic status. The retired object, as it was before, is lonely. That loneliness touches the artist's heart. But this retired object abandoned in the real world, at least from the artist's perspective, now props up the landscape and breathes inspiration into it. The retired object is what provides a sense of "warmth" to the landscape. The warmth of loneliness. The artist paints in a rush. Inevitably, like Liang Kai (1140-1210) of the Southern Song Dynasty, she does not render everything in the scene (the telephone pole, sidewalk, cars, buildings, roads, and trees) in careful detail. If she had done so, the painting would have become a museum. And the objects in the painting, like relics in the museum, would have become preserved in stasis. Everything in the painting cannot dig into the canvas and take root. Instead, the artist has left everything to float upon the canvas: in particular, she leaves the landscape to float like on a sheet of ice, brandishing her brush in a swoosh-swoosh of hasty strokes. The corporeal forms of the objects lose their body and texture through her quick brushstrokes, and they are left with smooth surfaces as if coated with tempera. As such, the viewer is unable to observe any of the details of the objects and the landscape. Having lost the landscape, the viewer instead acquires a smooth "painting." The objects-landscape transform into an image that glides over the canvas-ice. The image, having forgotten that is an icon-object, dances upon the sheet of ice. The artist does not and cannot land the objects on the canvas-airstrip. (The object itself does not wish it, or perhaps it takes a nonchalant attitude, but regardless, the artist) causes the object to continuously go around. The artist's brush-dance is the wake of this merry-go-round. Therefore, her painting is the dance of absence—between being and not being, taking off and landing, going and coming, yesterday and today, coming into being and disappearing, object and brush, before and after brushstrokes, visual cognition and abstraction, and reality and art. The waves of absence, marks of absence, the orchestra of absence, the dance of absence. The landscape is but the landscape of absence. In the end, the origin of art/painting is the absentee object. In the time-space of modernity-city, objects only refer to themselves. The city is a space in which lonely objects are put on display. These objects do not open themselves to the world. They only direct themselves inward, and this proclivity is what makes them lonely. Even when the artist attempts to imbue the object with value as an icon, or renders an image with a brush, the object does not respond. As such, the object is an "empty" icon. It simply exists. But this is a moment in which the object most perfectly parades itself. Although the artist seeks to communicate with the object-subject-landscape, they unfortunately rather enjoy their loneliness and isolation. At this point, the objects become a kind of fetish that may even demand worship from the artist. But disappointingly, the objects do not enter the canvas. In the world of cold fetishes, of objects and landscapes, how can the artist-painting survive? She can neither simply absorb everything nor can she erase them from existence. So, what kind of a damned world is this?
No matter what, the artist is a burdened figure in the realm of the object-landscape, and art and painting. The object-landscape keeps fleeting from vision, and the painting rarely emerges properly. To be more accurate, the artist-painting-art cannot successfully penetrate the loneliness of the object-landscape. This is not a goal that can be achieved by keeping one's eyes open and looking hard, instead it is a matter of subconsciously noticing the aura emanated from objects. As such, what ends up being lonely is the artist-painting-art. Such loneliness is a type of absence that arises when one cannot prove one's status or existence. It is as light to shadow, day to night, and everyday life to art; it is as father to mother, person to object, and nature to person. The more one wishes that "one should reflect on oneself within the depth of relationships, not indulge in the closed-minded narcissism" of "truthful awareness," the deeper the loneliness-absence. Nevertheless, this should not be a cause of despair. In fact, making a physical link with such an overwhelming loneliness is rather an inner condition and the ethical impetus for entering Indra's Net.
Perhaps since she has perceived these issues, the artist does not imbue an elaborate order to the object-painting. Everything comes from somewhere, briefly appears like an apparition, and then flows on to somewhere else. The artist leaves it be. Instead, she draws more on other senses. A clue to this is offered in Lee's statement that the "energy that comes from somewhere, the warmth that is formed as it lingers and transfers between humans and objects." She "carelessly" paints but her brush dances. As an example, let's examine Leaving Work, in which all elements of the piece dance in harmony. The pavement flows boldly from left to right at the bottom, like a flood. And the telephone cables come in from the left, not to be outdone, harshly clash with the telephone poles and illuminate the streetlights so brightly that it hurts the eyes. They cascade down the pole like a waterfall, and still having lost none of their momentum, cross over the walls and awaken the trees inside the yard. After this ruckus, again they unhurriedly disappear into the air to the right. The night clouds limply linger around the moon. The person nonchalantly walking out of the alleyway like a disinterested still-life, is on the way to exit the picture plane to the right. Of all the things that crawl in the painting, only the moon, with its wide-open eyes, gazes upon the still-life person. In her paintings, objects do not have to represent or mean anything. They exist within her paintings as apparitions and are free. The objects are themselves in there. They allow their warmth to bloom slowly, so subtle as to be undetectable like a faint fog. By doing so, the objects temporarily craft their own territory within and without the art-painting. In any case, only the objects are free, and only they are at peace.
Following her brushstrokes, it becomes evident the closer the object, the coarser the brushstrokes, and the clearer and thicker the texture of the painting. The coarser her brushstrokes and breaths become, the deeper she breathes into the deepest reaches of an object in which she has firmly injected herself and, in so doing, she causes the object to breathe out. Her coarse breaths and brushstrokes have therefore become a process of physically connecting with the object and sharing warmth, through a "tepid-deep-rich-embrace." It is of the nature of detecting the warmth that emanates like a thin plume of smoke from the object. It is an odd scenario that one will only encounter with one's eyes closed and with one's belly to the ground like a worm. Only when one crawls on the Earth, barebacked, like the mole, cricket or beetle, can one vaguely register the smells and sounds that seep into the ear and nose and pores, the sounds of the mundane world as experienced through a mystic touch. This is the "eroticism" and "full-body sense" that Choi Min reng cognized within Lee's past solo exhibition, and it is the line that links with "the state of bei
Press release courtesy Gallery Chosun.
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