Between the Space of Reality and Unreality
On the Solo Exhibition of Lee Hyun
by Lee Yil, Art Critic The name of Painter Lee Hyun may sound unfamiliar to us. She was educated and worked not in korea but in Rome. This is her first exhibition in Seoul, her premiere as a painter. She had her first solo exhibition in Rome last year and her exhibition toured major European cities. She returned home at the end of the same year, winding up her five-year stay in Rome.
Her paintings give us a very fresh felling and it is not because we see her works for the first time, but because they have freshness we cannot often fine in our surroundings.
Not to mention the limit of the figurative and non-figurative, she skillfully makes use of her unique cannons of painting in her composition and treatment of colors and shapes.
The point of her unique cannons of painting lies in the fact that the figurative motifs coexist naturally with the space of non-figurative painting and that the painting space is formed by the division of color planes. The indivisual objects as figurative motifs are defined in terms of color planes and lines dividing the planes.
Hers are definitely figurative paintings. However, the objects appearing in her painting have only the secondary meaning in the sphere of pure painting; in fact,the objects are boldly reduced to their simplicity and the individual objects have virtually lost their characteristic attributes. Instead, what controls over the entire surface is the simple and virtually abstracted space, and this constitutes the cardinal point of her composition.
When I said "abstracted", this is not confined to the shape of certain objects. The same can be said of colors. Not only the color planes themselves but also the division of color planes by distinct pure colors and their contrast are of the abstract nature. The division of color planes by pure colors and the extremely simplified shapes combine to create a harmonious, compact, dense and solid composition. And the feelings we receive from them are freshness and lucidity we find her saying:"I like things simple, pure and lucid."
On the other hand, id we see her paintings in terms of subjects, the nudes, figures, still lives and landscapes are not very much unlike those of the other figurative painters. In other words, they are the objects found in our daily surroundings. This ordinariness becomes in her painting rather a kind of the world of daydream in which reality and unreality coexist or respond with each other without ant constraints, and they are breathing in a homogeneous space. For instance, For instance, her nude is a nude, however, instead of being a simple naked body of a woman, the nude as a pure figurative motif is intergrated in the abstract color planes, and in the case of her landscapes, they are not a representation of actual scenes but a configuration of the images of "nature" she cherishes in her heart.
They are in other words "mental pictures of landscape."
What she has yet to accomplish is that whether a figure, a landscape or a still life she has to create a unity of the three, the spure space, colors and figures in her world of objects. This in other sense means the meeting of the external world and her inner world without boundary. However, in fact, the external world is intergrated in the painting space by the composition of pure color planes without regard to individual objects. It seems to me that she has the sensitive capacity to translate the above into reality, and this is what makes her painting transcend the ordinary reality into the space of imagination.
The paintings she introduces in her Seoul exhibition were the products of 1991 and 1994. Most of them were produced during her stay in Rome, but those produced after her return to Seoul seem to show that her method became more free and open. By this I mean that the external world and her inner world are directly and widely integrated or respend with each other. This proves in evidence that she as a painter has established a firm artistic vision.
This is her first solo exhibition in Seoul, bur she is in preparation of her second Seoul exhibition next year at the Art Center Gallery, and then exhibitions in Rome, Paris and Budapest. We look forward to her new prospect as a painter and to her debut int the international art world.
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