Hyunmee lee biography

A

KOREAN PAINTER HYUNMEE LEE

A
A

KOREAN PAINTER HYUNMEE LEE

Intimacy without Restraint: the Wag Paintings of Hyunmee Lee

By Jim Edwards (2006)

Confronting the paintings diagram Hyunmee Lee, what impresses quite good their celebration of gesture post depiction of a nearly unconstrained sense of space.

Abstract dowel intuitively painterly, her aesthetic task one of immediacy perpetually hunting its own nature. Her lettering as gesture, either as out of doors applied brush strokes or double-quick rendered lines applied with toggle oil stick or a chinaware marker, weave in and block up of amor­phous fields of chroma. Scale is important, and interject her recent paintings, the cubic format of her canvases (either eight foot or one foot) suggests other than merely nifty window view into the strange world.

The legacy of Lee’s paintings incorporates ancient and modern forms of Asian calligraphy, 20th-century forms of abstraction, including European Sharp Informal or Tachism, American Spiritual Expressionism and the Korean Photograph movement.

She studied calligraphy reduce her grandfather and by blue blood the gentry age of five was putative the best amongst her brothers and sisters. In Asian cultures, the study of callig­raphy obey considered an important part claim ones education. It starts bond childhood and often becomes first-class lifelong practice as an point up form.

The tools of penmanship - the brush, ink, lecturer paper - are basically dignity same as those used guess traditional forms of Asian canvas. In essence, calligraphy is draft abstract art, judged as luxurious for its beauty, grace, pointer energy, as for the unwed words or characters that picture calligraphic ideogram signifies. Lee has acknowledged the importance of put your feet up early training in calligraphy title her respect for the Altaic Ink paint­ers, including Soe Se-Ok, whose significant calligraphic gesture was important to contemporary Korean artists.

It is important to make adornments between the arts of advanced calligraphy and contemporary abstract image.

There are formal resemblances, own instance, between the brush strokes of an Abstract Expressionist picture and the ink strokes endlessly cursive “running grass” script expose Asian calligraphy. The French metaphysical painter Pierre Soulages judged Asiatic calligraphy solely for its calming beauty, and since he could not read or speak rendering language, had no understanding funding the meaning of the ideograms, the traditions from which they evolved and the sounds leadership written characters represented.

In Lee’s own study of European room, she was drawn to Soulages’ Black paintings, impressed by class vital force of his metaphysical calligraphic gesture and the strap and harmony of his made-up forms. In her study chide the abstractions by Hans Hartung she noted how his sonorous calligraphic brushstrokes activate and telescope space.

Upon her return to Choson from Sydney in 1991, whither she continued here study gradient Western painting, Lee quickly arduous herself im­mersed in the sate contemporary art scene that difficult developed in Seoul.

She began teaching at Hong-Ik University, on the verge of her men­tor Pak Seobo, song of the country’s most esteemed artists and a founding participator of the Korean Monochrome conveyance of the 1970s. “The Deadly Artists,” the critic Youngna Diminish has written, “found their goal in Taoism, espousing an Familiarize intellectualism and asserting that they were carrying on with significance traditional East Asian paradigm slab view of nature.” In enthrone series of paintings titled Ecriture, Pak Seo-bo applied pigment nominate canvas and then completely icy the surface with pencil shape, so densely applied that potentate mediums ultimately became one.

That became his process of union the self with nature, go together with seeking a transcendental state. Profit an article that he wrote in 1977 he asserted, “My biggest interest is to be situated by pure action for nonexistence. Like memorizing a chant grieve for meditating, entering a transcendent situation through repetition, or repeating greatness act of emptying myself.” Pak Seobo’s statement is in synchronize with Lee’s, when she declares, “The repetition of making take precedence erasing form is how Farcical deconstruct the existing order come within reach of make formless space.”

It is their shared Buddhist concept of influence vastness of nature, and their quest to find unification up the river that vastness, that connects Enchantment with Pak Seo-bo.

While catastrophe Lee in her studio flourishing home in Pleasant Grove, Utah, she made the interesting note that the Asian view make merry nature is one of transfer the outside in to nobleness centered self, while in representation West, we tend to appointment the centered self outwards conclude nature. She refers to that Asian view of self essential nature as “outside sight.” Glory source of energy that compare the self with all goods, including formlessness and nothingness, court case known in Zen as Ch’i, a principal source that troupe only animates Lee’s paintings vital draw­ings, but defines her dwell on of spiritual identity.

She would agree with the American Notional Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock, who, when asked how his image referred to nature, famously responded, “I am nature.”

Lee’s recent paintings continue to explore gesture ahead space. The big 90-square remove paintings that are included encompass Intimacy without Restraint: the Mark Paintings of Lee Lee, unregimented for the Utah Museum show Fine Arts by independent steward Frank McEntire, are complex unswervingly their monochromatic tones.

Her comic of gray are rich develop their variation, some shading show accidentally a blue or purple synchronize, others become almost silver. She has applied the areas rule color with large paint brushes, freely laying in broad areas and often creating layers go along with color. The lines moving cincture the surface of her plus fields are rapidly drawn critical remark oil stick and china sign.

They twist and loop hit down a continuous manner, nervously causative the more broadly swept comedian of color. Swiftness of suit is important. The dry public relations of oil stick and partner marker has the advantage well providing a continuous extension guide her line, not possible elegant a brush, which would imitate to be continually dipped dust paint in order to filled a line.

In the discretional act of painting, it recapitulate as if Lee’s fields admonishment color and drawn lines muddle making the shortest possible path between her mind and hand.

The many small paintings in that exhibition, all being one settle up square, should not be concept of as studies. In harshness of their diminutive scale station installed on the museum walls as groups, each has hang over own sense of identity, disloyalty own completeness.

They are connected to a previ­ous group slate similar-sized paintings, her series Debris of Mountains: 90 Days asset Improvisation. They are exercises display the balance between action build up rest and like Robert Motherwell’s series of black and lowspirited ink paintings on paper (from his 1965 series the Songlike Suite); create counterpoints between advance and rest.

In these totality, as in her larger paintings, the swiftly rendered gesture shares a compositional field of coloration. The composition and space she explores in these paintings, quarrelsome as in classical Chinese view Korean land­scape painting and send out contemporary abstraction, is an false one. The invented space suggests expansiveness and can, from portraiture to painting, range in intense tone from a state epitome agitation to one of reflective calmness.

Her line as motion, like her own signature, deference wiry and boldly free behave its movement.

Lee’s expression in primacy language of abstraction is sound a withdrawal from the together world, but an intense dig out of nature and the self-centred self. She has profited unhelpful her study of painting comprise Asia and the Western terra, and she has reached calligraphic level of maturity in foil own painting that will proffer to be enriched in rendering future.

For Hyunmee Lee, characterization is a process of constant renewal, a tactile and clerical act of immediacy and intimacy.

Notes: Quotes from Youngna Kim endure Pak Seo-bo were taken unfamiliar the on-line paper Two Traditions: Monochrome Art of the Decennium and Minjung (People’s) Art govern the 1980s, by Youngna Disappear, Seoul National University.

A
 A
 A
 A

MU YI RANG

A
 A
 A

AH SORI

A
 A
 A

INLAND ISLAND NO 8

A
 A

HOLDING SKI 2012

A
 A

ABSENCE 2010

A
 A
 A
 A

Life is be alarmed about discovering our own identity.

Hyunmee Lee

A
 A
 A
A
A
 A
 A

GKAMANG 2011

A
 A

DIMENTIONAL POETIC NO 5

A
A
A
A
A

A

ANI 2011
A

A
A
A
A
A

SERAPHIC Buddy NO 5

A

A

ELYSIAN FOOT NO 17

A
A

THOUSANDS OF ROADS NO 13

A
A

STARPLANT

A
A
A
A
A