No One Dies Alone, the second solo exhibition of Korean-American artist Timothy Hyunsoo Lee at the gallery, bringing together a number of paintings and interventions, relocating the artist's entire practice from a solipsistic introspection of traumatic memory and consciousness, towards a newfound extrospection; a process of cognition directed outward - a process of apprehending existents of the external world.
Earlier on, grounded in the experience of radical otherness, the artist explored seamlessly the conditions of immigration and psychological disorder through repetition as reconstruction -of trauma, of history, of heritage, opening up almost into abstraction, and mapping out his internal world. In this new body of work, Hyunsoo Lee externalizes this search, in order to embody and embed objects with a consciousness beyond the narrated I, speaking to the viewer from an infinite temporal distance.
No One Dies Alone is born out of curiosity about the concreteness of existence outside of the space of consciousness, riddled as it is with unpredictable uncertainties and risks, and largely defined by the event horizon of finality which is mortality. This unidirectionality of time, cutting mysteriously through lived time, heading towards an unmistakable and certain end, yet absent from the internal processes of pure consciousness, is rich in material paradoxes. It animates Hyunsoo Lee's quest to investigate the nature of images as a fleeting presence of memory, articulating an intermediate space between life and death. By means of this presence, more often ghostly and spectral, the artist is not only intervening time in order to slow or bypass death, but asking whether the experience of mortality, to which he turns to for the first time, is private or public, a solitary passing or a movement within a community? What role does personal extinction play in the community of memory?
In his own death portrait - a tradition in Korea, Lotto Lotto (Farewell), 2015, the artist covers his own portrait in gold leaf, then scratches it off to reveal the image, as if latently coming from another world, or being discovered in a distant future, or out of a fundamental break in the symmetry between past and future. With uncanny playfulness, Hyunsoo Lee imbues the lottery ticket with the meaning it acquired for Korean immigrants in the United States and the promise of immediate wealth. The American dream unfolds as an ambivalent sequence of collective but unfulfilled desires. Similarly, the question of the American dream is explored through the neon work Serenity, 2015, where the artist translates his human touch into a commercial inscription. Neon lights are associated in consumerist cultures as a dramatic form of advertisement - their mesmerizing glow beckons an audience to interact with its message. For Hyunsoo Lee, torn between two cultures and identities, the neon lights represented a beacon and triggering memories of his first interaction with New York City at Times Square. The word flickers, in a pale blue, threatening to extinguish any second - a nod to the transience of our existence.
Gold leaf, too, begins to occupy a more symbolic place in the artist's work, with its reference to both mortality and royalty: One of the earliest examples of gold leaf in art is the Egyptian death mask of King Tutankhamun. As in the early Christian icons, here we can see how gold leaf is applied as an outer layer of remembrance: Everything that is worth remembering must be gilded in gold.
Likewise, in 82 moments in gold, the artist intervenes the physical realm around him and hammers 82 nails with their ends gilded in gold into the wall. The number 82 represents the age of the artist's grandmother - an individual that exerted profound influence over Hyunsoo as a child. But what is in a number? We hold sentimental values in counting - they allow us to track, to contain, to measure, and to make order from disorder. But numbers are meaningless without a context - its significance only realized when the counting stops; 82 is only meaningful to the artist because there is no 83.
Gilding and revealing is a metaphor in Hyunsoo Lee for the objective weight of public and cultural memory in general versus the subjects and agents of contingent, personal recollections. The gold represents a prize that has been earned, a memory that exists but that is neither possessed not remembered; it is pure objective content without a sentient being to hold it. Instead of presenting to us his interior chambers, the artists is inviting the audience to a journey between life and death, between history and memory, between dreams and nightmares, constructing delicate lines along the edges of which we experience life as narrated madness.
In Forever Lost, Always Dreaming, 2015, we begin this journey looking into either a window or a color field, made from a Koreanwedding textile dating back to 1951: Something grows and dies out, is born again, passes from being into non-being. Does the possibility of death matter? There seems to be a thin fragile space for the sublime.
Blue, however, is the central pictorial focus of this exhibition - dealing with dreams, waters, skies, and at present the principal locus of Hyunsoo Lee's practice, slowing and reducing the visual field to a single channel in which possession of visual knowledge alone does not enable expression; it is necessary to go one step further. The watercolour A Study of Serenity and Death, 2015, illuminates the artist's existential anxiety through undulating waves and movements, expanding lived time into an incomplete vortex of whirling forces. The two watercolors from the series As my Breath Passes Over Me (명복), 2015, are a dream-like portrayal of the soul rising to heaven, choking its last breath, and disappearing into the unknown of a deep blue sky. So rare in classical art because of the rarity of azurite and ultramarine, yet omnipresent in nature, the blue color has simultaneously stood for the male and female archetypes, for distance, for the divine and the otherworldly.
Accordingly, at the center of the exhibition there is the large painting No One Dies Alone, 2015, inspired by a dream of the artist, where he stood atop one of these hills overlooking an identical landscape, lost somewhere between temporalities. The burial mounds of kings, abundant in Korea, and traditionally associated with death in the ancient world, are in Hyunsoo Lee's work a portal into another world, enabled by the possibilities of this one. The work is positioned in a dark chamber with grass laid out on the floor - a representation of the entryway to the royal tombs, but also referencing the nostalgic serenity Hyunsoo finds in lying down on a grassy field at night, staring up at the cosmos.
The tension in blue is augmented in I'm So Sorry (The Crusade), 2015, where forms coalesce into each other without breaking, and finally a climatic point in reached in works from the Soom series, 2015, that operate as smooth color fields, punctuated only by the shapes characteristic of the artist's work. What possibly are they? Monads, cells, compartments, division lines; all the answers are feasible. The pressure of arresting time becomes manifest by becoming invisible, flattening out all images, all possible representations.
The exhibition No One Dies Alone is a point of origin with an irrevocable final reference, meditatively speaking about circles and cycles, reducing the movement of living forces to basic relations and forms: Points, lines, circles, dots - the legacy of Kandinsky, and inviting us almost imperceptibly to inhabit simultaneously in the different paths thatthe universe can take through time. The Origin of the World, 2015, is a found wood piece covered in gold leaf, resembling a female torso not unlike Courbet's eponymous work, and signaling a singular point of departure, the feminine universal, and embedding into an object the consciousness not of a time, but of all times, and simultaneously the possibility of death itself. You can see only clean lines, translucent, almost carrying the weight of humanity, illustrated in metaphors borrowed from Korean culture, but yet breaking out of all cultures, out of all formal systems of meaning, bringing us closer and closer to the abyss.
What happens when we die? Simon Critchley, in a book aptly titled Very Little... Almost Nothing offers a speculative but cautiously secular answer: "We are mortals, you and I. There is only my dying and your dying and nothing beyond. You will die and there is nothing beyond. I shall slowly disappear until my heart stops its soft padding against the lining of my chest. Until then, the drive to speak continues, incessantly. Until then, we carry on. After that there is nothing." The pure terror of nothingness which Critchley refers to, haunts Timothy Hyunsoo Lee's work and captivates him, and is contrasted with his almost obsessive desire to continue speaking, to halt the arrow of time, in order to continue speaking in circles and lines, in forms and monochromes. Yet time keeps pointing us patiently towards the abyss. From this primal scene of emptiness, surrounded by the chaos of the world, it is there that we begin to recognize the thingness of the world, when we leave it behind.
Press release courtesy Sabrina Amrani.
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