The artist Hye-In Lee believes that people live inside of structure in which, regardless of their free wills, they are mechanically manipulated and dominated by the system, governmental authority or capital power that controls the society. She particularly endeavors to discover the ways to express with dual and treble meanings the nature of human beings under constrained conditions. The artist paints portraits of the unordinary people who run the world economy using the information obtained from the media with ready-made frames. She also directly reveals her fear towards the world where everything disappears, by reinterpreting the scenery she sketched: destroying and rebuilding the virtual world existing in her memories.
The artist has earnestly expressed certain invisible conditions that made us to live in a determined way through series of drawings and paintings with strong expressivity as well as installation works metaphorically conveying the pictorial symbol system. The artist's view of the world spreads based on the circulation principle where images are born and become extinct. The images symbolize the characters and events in her past that took place in Neunggok near Seoul. Neunggok, meaning hills and valleys, is a historic county with old kings' tombs are near at hand. Moreover, it is the artist's home where she was born and bred, a single world and universe where the layers of her memories are accumulated. However, like other livable lands around the capital area, the appearance of Neunggok from the recent past ghastly eroded away, and tsunami of concrete covered the red soiled earth. The destructions are, in everywhere, still in the present progressive form.
There is an old (four Chinese letter) phrase ‘ Neung-gok-ji-byun ', a steep hill turns into a deep valley and a deep valley turns into a steep hill. That is to say, the phrase means that things change in an extreme manner. While miscellaneous constructions changed the topography and the painstakingly and arduously built houses were rebuilt and demolished, the artist was compelled to leave her home and move to another city. Paradoxically, this experience worked as the centrifugal force for her to wander about the Neunggokarea to defend the old. There, the scenes from past to present the artist witnessed are transferred into small sketches, and adapted to distorted gazes. The vague remembrances of the originals, dwelling in the incised hills and shallow valleys, remain as wounds. Yet, they vividly return in the artist's rough paintings, and revive by being counterposed to the personified symbols of the incomplete existences. The earth dug up by bulldozers and the roar of heavy vehicles raking the pieces of flesh, the scamper of an overwhelming dump truck with a massive tail of dust, red soil graves, a wooden house burning like a candle in the middle of this field, clipped woods, a large gaping black hole, and another space breaking through the center of the painting are all personified to dual symbols, while the friends and neighbors of the past became the portraits of people with tragic faces.
Lee's solo exhibition at Brain Factory shows the entire exhibition space covered with blazing silhouettes of landscapes on three walls. To explain, the two paintings on the sides are widely installed with a size that can cover most of the wall (450x230cm), and ‘Red Eyes' (152x202cm), a painting created by the automatic drawing technique based on the drawings of scenes from Neunggok, is located in the center of the hall. The two red eyes literally glare at the audiences with penetrating brightness. Ruminating on the sunset over the hills, the artist's old friend colored in the light, and the glow on his cheeks, this three sided painting, one at a time, belches forth the scenes of Neunggok that were crushed in the memory, and then swallows them again. The artist is multi dimensionally recasting her past sketches of portraits and landscape series on a large screen.
The overlapped scenes with lumps of crushed colors and the suspended heads are stamped and deconstructed by a certain power, and becomes part of the uncanny scene. However, the things that are mixed in the screen is isolated and ruptured according to the circulation law that the artist has defined, and moves on to another moment of birth. The figures of neighbors in the memory, sleeping under the surface, and the scenes, now different from the old days, float to consciousness while being thickly darned. This strange and unfamiliar world melts at the same time it is created, and the rupture begins under the surface of the crossing space like a splitting straight line.
The hyaline fragments of the memory breaks into smaller pieces, and shows the moment of rupture by a certain power hanging in the air. The bottomless black hole in the center of the painting intensely absorbs the fragments of the broken world. Another black hole, forming at a different place, forebodes that this chaos would never stop but accelerate. In the end, the artist exfoliates the truth of this world filled with ironies by destroying the world where her family and the artist herself belong to. She painfully isolates her will as an artist by paradoxically emphasizing that we are the same incomplete beings who do not belong to any places.
Choi Heung Cheol (Arko Museum Chief Curator)
