KOREAN PAINTER
HYUNMEE LEE
A
KOREAN PAINTER HYUNMEE LEE
Intimacy without Restraint: the Gesture Paintings of
Hyunmee Lee
By Jim Edwards (2006)
Confronting the paintings of Hyunmee Lee, what impresses is
their celebration of gesture and depiction of a nearly unlimited sense of
space. Abstract and intuitively painterly, her aesthetic is one of immediacy
perpetually seeking its own nature. Her marks as gesture, either as broadly
applied brush strokes or swiftly rendered lines applied with an oil stick or a
china marker, weave in and out of amorphous fields of paint. Scale is
important, and in her recent paintings, the square format of her canvases
(either eight foot or one foot) suggests other than merely a window view into
the seen world.
The legacy of Lee’s paintings incorporates ancient and
modern forms of Asian calligraphy, 20th-century forms of abstraction, including
European Art Informal or Tachism, American Abstract Expressionism and the
Korean Monochrome movement. She studied calligraphy with her grandfather and by
the age of five was deemed the best amongst her brothers and sisters. In Asian
cultures, the study of calligraphy is considered an important part of ones
education. It starts in childhood and often becomes a lifelong practice as an
art form. The tools of calligraphy - the brush, ink, and paper - are basically
the same as those used in traditional forms of Asian painting. In essence,
calligraphy is an abstract art, judged as much for its beauty, grace, and
energy, as for the single words or characters that the calligraphic ideogram signifies.
Lee has acknowledged the importance of her early training in calligraphy and
her respect for the Korean Ink painters, including Soe Se-Ok, whose
significant calligraphic gesture was important to contemporary Korean artists.
It is important to make distinctions between the arts of
contemporary calligraphy and contemporary abstract painting. There are formal
resemblances, for instance, between the brush strokes of an Abstract
Expressionist painting and the ink strokes of cursive “running grass” script of
Asian calligraphy. The French abstract painter Pierre Soulages judged Japanese
calligraphy solely for its formal beauty, and since he could not read or speak
the language, had no understanding of the meaning of the ideograms, the
traditions from which they evolved and the sounds the written characters
represented. In Lee’s own study of European abstraction, she was drawn to
Soulages’ Black paintings, impressed by the vital force of his abstract
calligraphic gesture and the collision and harmony of his invented forms. In
her study of the abstractions by Hans Hartung she noted how his powerful
calligraphic brushstrokes activate and compress space.
Upon her return to Korea from Sydney in 1991, where she
continued here study of Western painting, Lee quickly found herself immersed
in the thriving contemporary art scene that had developed in Seoul. She began
teaching at Hong-Ik University, joining her mentor Pak Seobo, one of the
country’s most famous artists and a founding member of the Korean Monochrome movement
of the 1970s. “The Monochrome Artists,” the critic Youngna Kim has written,
“found their basis in Taoism, espousing an Eastern intellectualism and
asserting that they were carrying on with the traditional East Asian paradigm
and view of nature.” In his series of paintings titled Ecriture, Pak Seo-bo
applied pigment to canvas and then completely covered the surface with pencil
lines, so densely applied that his mediums ultimately became one. This became
his process of unifying the self with nature, of seeking a transcendental
state. In an article that he wrote in 1977 he asserted, “My biggest interest is
to live by pure action for nothingness. Like memorizing a chant or meditating,
entering a transcendent state through repetition, or repeating the act of
emptying myself.” Pak Seobo’s statement is in sync with Lee’s, when she
declares, “The repetition of making and erasing form is how I deconstruct the
existing order to make formless space.”
It is their shared Buddhist concept of the vastness of
nature, and their quest to find unification within that vastness, that connects
Lee with Pak Seo-bo. While visiting Lee in her studio and home in Pleasant
Grove, Utah, she made the interesting comment that the Asian view of nature is
one of bringing the outside in to the centered self, while in the West, we tend
to project the centered self outwards upon nature. She refers to this Asian
view of self and nature as “outside sight.” The source of energy that connect
the self with all things, including formlessness and nothingness, is known in
Zen as Ch’i, a principal source that not only animates Lee’s paintings and drawings,
but defines her sense of spiritual identity. She would agree with the American
Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock, who, when asked how his
painting referred to nature, famously responded, “I am nature.”
Lee’s recent paintings continue to explore gesture and
space. The big 90-square inch paintings that are included in Intimacy without
Restraint: the Gesture Paintings of Lee Lee, organized for the Utah Museum of
Fine Arts by independent curator Frank McEntire, are complex in their
monochromatic tones. Her fields of gray are rich in their variation, some
shading to a blue or purple tone, others become almost silver. She has applied
the areas of color with large paint brushes, freely laying in broad areas and
often creating layers of color. The lines moving across the surface of her
color fields are rapidly drawn with oil stick and china marker. They twist and
loop in a continuous manner, nervously activating the more broadly swept fields
of color. Swiftness of execution is important. The dry media of oil stick and
china marker has the advantage of providing a continuous extension of her line,
not possible with a brush, which would have to be continually dipped in paint
in order to complete a line. In the spontaneous act of painting, it is as if
Lee’s fields of color and drawn lines are making the shortest possible route
between her mind and hand.
The many small paintings in this exhibition, all being one
foot square, should not be thought of as studies. In spite of their diminutive
scale and installed on the museum walls as groups, each has its own sense of
identity, its own completeness. They are related to a previous group of
similar-sized paintings, her series Fragments of Mountains: 90 Days of
Improvisation. They are exercises in the balance between action and rest and
like Robert Motherwell’s series of black and blue ink paintings on paper (from
his 1965 series the Lyric Suite); create counterpoints between action and rest.
In these works, as in her larger paintings, the swiftly rendered gesture shares
a compositional field of color. The composition and space she explores in these
paintings, just as in classical Chinese and Korean landscape painting and in
contemporary abstraction, is an invented one. The invented space suggests
expansiveness and can, from painting to painting, range in emotional tone from
a state of agitation to one of meditative calmness. Her line as gesture, like
her own signature, is wiry and boldly free in its movement.
Lee’s expression in the language of abstraction is not a
withdrawal from the objective world, but an intense investigation of nature and
the subjective self. She has profited by her study of painting in Asia and the
Western world, and she has reached a level of maturity in her own painting that
will continue to be enriched in the future. For Hyunmee Lee, painting is a
process of continual renewal, a tactile and spiritual act of immediacy and
intimacy.
Notes: Quotes from Youngna Kim and Pak Seo-bo were taken
from the on-line paper Two Traditions: Monochrome Art of the 1970s and Minjung
(People’s) Art of the 1980s, by Youngna Kim, Seoul National University.
Comments by Lee were shared with Jim Edwards in a studio interview on December
9, 2005, or in e-mail that followed that studio visit.
A
MU YI
RANG
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AH SORI
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INLAND
ISLAND NO 8
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HOLDING
SKI 2012
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ABSENCE 2010
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Life is about discovering
our own identity.
Hyunmee Lee
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GKAMANG
2011
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DIMENTIONAL
POETIC NO 5
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ANI 2011
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A
ATHOUSANDS
OF ROADS NO 11
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B
CROSSING NO 28
SERAPHIC
STONE NO 5
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ELYSIAN
FOOT NO 17
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THOUSANDS
OF ROADS NO 13
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STARPLANT
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HYUNMEE LEE
1961 Hyunmee Lee was born in Seoul Korea, where she grew up practicing
Western Modern art with experience in Eastern painting and calligraphy. Her art
practice crosses three continents over two decades. 1985 Lee graduated Hong-Ik
University majoring in painting. At the end of that year, she moved to
Australia. She stayed there for six years and achieved two post graduate
degrees. 1989 She exhibited in her first commercial gallery, Bonython-Meodemore
Gallery, Sydney. At the same time, her work was exposed through a contemporary
art book (Art Four). 1991 Hyunmee Lee earned a Master of Arts in Visual Arts
(MFA) at the Sydney College of Arts, University of Sydney and returned to
Korea. She lived in Korea for seven years. There she taught in Hong-Ik
University as a lecturer and exhibited in solo shows in major art galleries and
art fairs in Seoul. 1997 Lee came to Utah, U.S.A. where she continuously taught
in universities and built up her art career. 2001 She became a faculty member
of Utah Valley University. 2002 Lee had her first solo show in America, called Mountain Armatures, at the Woodbury Art Museum in
Orem, Utah. 2006 She showed her large scale work in the Utah Museum of Fine
Arts, Intimacy Without
Restraint. 2008 After achieving tenure, she retired from teaching and more
fully concentrated on her art. She is currently working with U.S.A galleries.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My art practice crosses three continents over two decades. The works
consider the images and ideas that mark my journey into the spiritual and
cultural dimensions of painting as a creative activity. During a period when I
have carried adventurous journeys across several different social and
geographic divides, I began to search deeper for an understanding of who I am,
and where I am. My paintings started to explore the idea of self as the most
fundamental element of human nature; I tried to seek my identity as I examined
human nature.
CV
Master of Arts in Visual Arts (MFA), the University of Sydney, Sydney
Graduate Diploma in Visual Arts (MA), the University of Sydney, Sydney
Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting, Hong-Ik University, Seoul
Solo Exhibitions
2011 Native Mumbling: Sori Sori, Julie Nester Gallery, Park City
2011 Native Mumbling: da da ga ga, Nüart Gallery, Santa Fe
2011 Native Mumbling: Ma Ba Sa, Cheryl Hazan Contemporary Art, New York
City
2010 Native Mumbling: Ga Na Da Ra, Phillips Gallery, Salt Lake City
2009 Inland Crossing, Nüart Gallery, Santa Fe
2009 Dimensional Poetics, Julie Nester Gallery, Park City
2008 Meditative Gesture, Bill Lowe Gallery, Atlanta
2008 Contact-Sensation: The Harmony of Opposites, Nüart Gallery, Santa
Fe
2008 Touch: Meditation Joins Gesture, Phillips Gallery, Salt Lake City
2007 Foreordained Gesture, Nüart Gallery, Santa Fe
2006 Intimacy without Restraint, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake
City
2006 Outside Sight, Phillips Gallery, Salt Lake City
2005 When Gesture Finds Its Power, Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art,
Logan
2002 Mountain Armatures, Woodbury Gallery, Orem
2001 Utah Arts Festival, Salt Lake City, 2001
1997 Seeing Through the Self, Moin Gallery, Seoul
1997 Seoul Art Fair by Moin Gallery, Seoul Arts Centers, Seoul
1996 Seoul Art Fair by Moin Gallery, Seoul Arts Centers, Seoul
1995 Unconsciousness & Gesture, Gallery Ihn, Seoul
