Lee-Nam Lee’s art has been rapidly changing from traditional carving, art fusing daily objects and images to animation, images recorded from daily life or changing of nature, art arranged with fragments of reality to recent moving images appropriated the old masterpiece. If Lee’s previous work reflected concerns about reality, his recent work, appropriations of great masters’ famous paintings, reveals the artist’s will to rescue dead things through space-time travel back to their time or to change the past.

Lee invests new vitality in old masterpieces just with providing a small movement, with a help of digital technology, or substituting realistic movement for potential movement of an image in a painting. However, Lee does not persue a farfetched or exaggerated manipulation, but gives us a sentiment that naturally evolves in the painting its own painter tried to express. For example, in the Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer, Lee inserts a single teardrop into a maiden’s eyes. The single teardrop sincerely expresses sorrow of hopeless love of the artist Jan Vermeer van Delft and his servant. A viewer can directly experience hyper-space-time transition through positive reception and feel sympathy. In the Monet’s pond, we can see a fish swimming in the water.

Lee-Nam Lee lives and works in Gwangju, Korea. Lee studied painting and sculpture in Chosun University and received PhD degree in Yonsei University. He has had 15 solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group exhibitions in Korea, Germany and England.