SANG NAM LEE

'I touch the line between modernism and postmodernism, rationality andirrationality, analogue and digital, painting and architecture, art and design.I live in between. Painting makes everything possible. It can holdeverything.'–Sang Nam Lee

Before moving to New York in 1981, Sang Nam Lee took part in manyexperimental art exhibitions. In 1972 and 1974, Lee exhibited his _Window_series, utilising the then-innovative medium of photography, at _Indépendants_exhibition. He went on to steadily expand his global footprint, showcasingwork across a range of events spanning the Daegu Contemporary ArtFestival, an experimental mid-1970s Daegu-based art movement, Korea: AFacet of Contemporary Art, 1977 exhibition at the Central Museum of Artin Tokyo, and even the 15th São Paulo Biennial, held in 1979. Indeed, itwas an invitation to participate in Korean Drawings Now, a group exhibitionat the Brooklyn Museum, that brought Lee to New York in 1981. Not longafter Lee left for New York, Bahc Yiso (Mo Bahc) also left Korea for theUnited States. For Lee–then a young man in his twenties–the 1970s wasa time of endless experimentation and theoretical questions about paintingitself, a period of discovering how own aesthetic and contemplating theanti-traditional methods and mediums of artists like Park Seo-Bo and LeeUfan through opportunities such as the Indépendants exhibition.

In 1981, when Sang Nam Lee first began working there, the New York artscene held no great love for the kind of minimalism and conceptual art hehad encountered in Korea. Rather, the buzz then was about GermanExpressionism, Neo-Expressionism, and paintings by Eric Fischl and DavidSalle; and so, it was amidst a veritable flood of different concepts, artists,and art institutions that Lee began to explore the bounds of his own artisticlanguage all through the 1980s and into the mid-1990s. From the vantagepoint of Lee's return to Korea, beginning with his 1997 exhibition at GalleryHyundai, this early New York period marked an important turning point inthe formation of his work. As alternative independent spaces startedproliferating across the city, critical theories of feminist art, Third World art,colonialism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism were beginning tosweep the art world in New York. When Bahc Yiso, with his founding of 'Minor Injury-'an alternative space in Brooklyn–in 1985, began activelyorganising solo exhibitions of Third World artists long relegated to themargins, circling the realm of identity politics, Sang Nam Lee turned togeometric abstraction in painting to find the answers that he did not find inSeoul. The form of Lee's images from these early New York years will strikethose acculturated to the reproducibility of painting as foreign, a set ofalien signs. They appear simultaneously as image, and shape, and form,and sign. Each is composed of geometric elements–point, line, and plane–but they are also enigmatic forms, difficult to pin down: a riddle.

During his time in New York, Lee took part in Personal History/PublicAddress at Bahc Yiso's Minor Injury and Homeless at Home atStorefront Gallery for Art and Architecture, a show organised by foundingdirector Kyong Park. Through exhibitions like these, the artist's work wasable to break away from the modernist approach of separating the worldof painting from the world beyond the frame. For Lee, painting constructsan intertwined worldview in which our living spaces, architectural spaces,and social issues intersect and maintain close relations with one another.Especially during the same period, Lee emphasised the process ofphenomenologically re-positioning painting in the context of architecturalspace, establishing a distinctive mode of "installation painting in situ." Hisdescriptions of 'dislocating, twisting, and overlapping,' reminiscent ofGilles Deleuze, reveal a process of expanding the understanding ofpainting itself to include new relationships with architecture, design, andthe surrounding space. Furthermore, this relates to the way in whichaccumulated signs manifest in his paintings, such as numbers, symbols,letters, and codes. And this, in turn, leads to philosophical reflections on thedifferent ways we live our lives, our various entanglements, and, indeed, ourvery existence.

Formally, Sang Nam Lee's work belongs to the category of geometricabstraction, but these works also contain collisions and ruptures inmeaning that arise from a constant denial of any fixed relationshipbetween the form and content of the image/sign. From time to time, these cracks can generate a kind of tension and wit–and we come tounderstand that Lee's paintings do not reproduce distinct forms. Ofcourse, the shapes we see between images might, at one instant, appearto be an all-encompassing city of mechanical civilisation; or a panoramaof everyday objects accumulated into multiple layers; or a march ofmusical notes taking on geometric shapes: themes that reveal the flow ofenergy in color and form. Color, however, has here departed from thegrammar of representation. At times, Sang Nam Lee's signs–like signalsfrom someone else–convey an esoteric, mysterious air. Why does Leeintentionally resist fixing his images in place? Why does he set his formsin motion, slipping and sliding, so that we cannot recognise them?

The forms chosen by Sang Nam Lee, turned into signs, are 'nomadicbeings' that float constantly between here and there, refusing to settledown. When we understand the images in Lee's work to be signs, theydo not then settle down in one place to create a story and build andidentity; rather, they roam, nomads unable to root in place, continuallyconnecting and entangling the here with the there. Lee's signs are notunrelated to his own life and his journey through the various cities inwhich he has lived. The artist has long shaped himself into a kind of 'drifting' being, an existence always on the move. The way Lee's piecesseem to offer a space of entanglement connecting online and offline; theway it feels natural to draw a connection between his work and artificialintelligence, or self-generated images; and indeed, the way his oeuvreembraces and integrates the extremes of analog and digital writ large:this can all be traced back to the power of the drifting image in Lee'spaintings. The artist's 'drawing diaries,' which he kept for decades, area record of such floating signs. When Lee's forms are fixed and hisimages made legible, Lee returns to the negation of the image–apainterly phase to be navigated once more.

When the images created through this process seem at risk of beinglabeled with meaning, the artist once more sets his images and signsslipping and sliding. While we, as a society, generally understand thefixed meaning of a given image to be what it symbolises, Sang Nam Lee'screations function in a manner that is closer to the 'allegorical impulse' ofpostmodern artists and theorists, or 'allegory' according to Germanphilosopher Walter Benjamin, or the "obtuse meaning" of Roland Barthes.In rejecting the symbolic meanings inherent in a culture, Lee chooses amode of thinking that actively denies the primary meanings, stereotypes,and traditions assumed by that culture. This is an approach that enrichesmeaning, embracing and engaging the diverse ideas of different peopleand moving away from modes of exclusion. Created in a neo-abstractmode, Lee's geometric landscape paintings hold the properties andattributes of many disparate cultures and languages as well as ethnicities.The resulting signs are the images he has accumulated over more thanfour decades. They are more than just shapes; they are compressedlandscapes of the artist's mind, revealing the vistas of the cities and siteshe has painted, the trajectories and journeys that make up his life.

The way in which the artist arrives at the shape of a sign is important,certainly, but in Sang Nam Lee's work, the process of production itself isalso quite unusual. In the earlier works, everything was done by hand–from creating the shape of a prototype to transferring it into the realm of theplane; gradually, however, he began utilizing computers for prototyping,which could then be subjected to a kind of 'algorithmic' process to extractmore images. The production method, which the artist describes as one of 'marquetry' (or inlay), is the result of many distinct processes that includethe application of acrylic paint as a base, then a layer of lacquer to thatbase, followed by sanding and colouring. To Lee, erasing any traces of hisactual handiwork is a part of the 'labour required to create an artificial,smooth substance.' In Lee's aptly-titled painting 4-fold landscape (2016),images are superimposed and folded to create a new image.

Sang Nam Lee's choice of Forme d'esprit as the title for this presentexhibition is a testament to the fact that the forms and signs of his imagesare not unrelated to the journey, trajectory, and spirit of the mind. Theway the artist represents the process of 'sensing,' with various iconsoverlapping or even colliding, also recalls the body movements embodiedin him practiced at the Judson Dance Theater (an experimental art andavant-garde collective in New York presenting dance, performance art,etc.). By moving their own bodies, viewers encounter–by chance–theicons within the paintings, breaking the remembered forms they know andexperiencing the birth of a new image (sign).

The work of Sang Nam Lee, in which the artist becomes one with thematerial itself, requiring the application of countless hours and tirelesslabor for completion, ultimately reaches a point of resolution in complete opposition to the materiality of the surface itself, which was often thefocus of artists practicing Dansaekhwa. Lee does not suppress the riotof color that characterizes the great cities of our day, like New York; nordoes she reject the smoothness of the mechanical, minimalist surface.Via New York, Lee has created relational landscape paintings that aredistinctly contemporary: geometric, entropic, and thus rhizomaticallyintertwined, reflecting the lives of his contemporaries as they move anddrift between here and there (and this 'here' and 'there,' after all, aren'tactually assigned to any specific place, are they?). Much as the distancebetween foreground and background is compressed and vanished inLee's works, the horizontal temporality of its space serves a key function;meaning that 'here' and 'there' can easily be transposed to 'there' and 'here,' refusing to exist in the dynamic of power that is the relationbetween centre and periphery. Sang Nam Lee's paintings, which existsomewhere between analog and digital, modernism and postmodernism,create landscapes of entanglement itself–the kind of entanglement thatmediates space, place, and temporality alike.