YUNHEE LEE
South KoreaYunhee Lee’s work, based on ceramics, creates its own narrative and emits its own light. With intricate patterns meticulously drawn in gold on a smooth white surface, her work is characterized by an abundance of grotesque figures symbolizing life and death, which are arranged and combined to form a unique world of the artist. Combining injection molding, an industrial ceramic technique that allows for mass production, with elaborate and detailed decorative details and coloring, Lee’s work tells a story through a language-like hybrid of images that shape individual narrative scenes.
The Night of Fianna (2017) and La divina commedia (2014) are stories that she has created through a long and intensive process of labor and practice. Images of girls, skeletons, dismembered bodies, flora and fauna are deeply embedded in the frame to produce narratives of desire and deficiency, life and death, sin and introspection that have sedimented in human history. Despite the three-dimensional and relief forms, Lee compresses her narratives within the frames. The moment a viewer encounters them, the flat yet profound sculptures unfold stories engraved on the ceramics, evoking a sense of grandeur and sublimity reminiscent of religious and historical narratives.
Text courtesy THEO.
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