Manna Lee’s works are dark, dim, and deep. Stains and traces of paints bloom like frost flowers on the skin of the hazy paintings. At a moment, the flowers become a tree and intact scene. He paints a night view of a city, tree, ivy, and so forth. They are ordinary things he encounters on everyday routine. Although the subjects seem to be so much familiar and well known, the more we try to see them, the stranger and odder they become. It tends to explode the sense of transcendence and mysterious air, especially intensifies the peculiarity of the night. Lee delicately pays attention to buildings, gardens, and trees that are partially favored by the light. Nature he sees is so-called the ‘domesticated nature,’ aesthetically or functionally reduced and distortedly tamed in the managing and controlling by the humans. People cut, cultivate, and embrace grasses and trees for different purposes. They decorate and grow plants for their own desires. Yet nature heals and overcomes herself in order to remove the boundary for she cannot be confined or captured by others. It is why the tenacious will for life that forests and grasses hold is often considered fearful. Night is filled with enigmatic force of the wild nature.

One day, the ‘merely-nothing’ sceneries in everyday life suddenly seemed strange and odd to Lee. He carefully examined and painted them on a canvas driven by incomprehensible doubts and desire surely residing inside his thoughts. While he painted, he continuously faced with unknown questions. As a result what he has painted was not an outward appearance of a specific substance but a dim portrait of the inner world triggered by him. The world has been always a riddle for the subject. In Camus’ words, it is the absurdity the world possesses. It quietly escapes the frame of languages we have learned. Knowledge is helpless in the world of raw matters. The external comes into the internal and douses all the time. Representation is, therefore, impossible.

Lee’s works at first seems to represent specific materials and describe the visible world. Yet in fact, they show the flip side of the world, which is the artist’s inner self. He attempts to paint the unfamiliarity created when we try to vividly contact the external world without any convention. That is, he paints the exact moment when the meaning and function of an object becomes extinct and only the peculiar and strange image remains. The matter, which has always been the object of the meaning, at last, becomes the ‘subject.’ Lee’s paintings enable us to experience a different but possible world through arranging an accidental meeting for us with the matter at a place where all the known prejudices are removed. The weird sceneries he creates are obviously the ones that exist and do not exist simultaneously in this world. They are an ambiguous view, lying between the everyday and non-everyday life, reality and unreality, visibility and invisibility, and objectivity and subjectivity. All matters display their surfaces and skins, but the artist considers what is beyond them. A shell itself is clearly not the essence but it allows us to imagine the hidden side of it. We picture of an infinite space and enter into it through the surface. A painting is also a medium which unavoidably attaches the hull of a substance on the surface of a canvas, but at the same time, it suggests the back side - which eventually becomes the surface with tremendous depth.

The artist catches a sense of feeling that things he sees in his everyday life are somehow very strange. He even feels the powerful energy they release. The word ‘strange’ calls for the inner psychological state driven by an outer experience. He questions the sceneries and matters that he sees at the moment: “everything that I see and know should not be the ‘all.’ What I see is not the only world.” While looking at a specific scene, every shape comes into his sight and things of a different nature overlap like a scene in a myth where the time has stopped. He sees, or attempts to see, something outside the world a human could not detect. He meets coincidences that unexpectedly and abruptly jump into daily life when the irrational and mythological world invades the reality. All of the sudden, the reality cracks and become isolated. The artist describes the moment as ‘heterotopia.’

Lee takes pictures of everyday scene and paints referring to them. He first sketches with charcoal, then represents a scene in a non-representational way through scattering, shedding, and covering paints on the canvas. The reason he uses these techniques is not to describe the world with the words, but to solve the problem with accidental effects on unintended states. Thus, particles, blobs, and drops of paints gather and pile to change the thick depth of the scene shallow. Brush strokes permeating on the canvas substantialize the peculiar feeling that he received from the subject by transferring the experience in a tactile manner. Meticulous and ‘gluey’ touches float around on the space in which mysterious and unknown atmosphere sails. The way he paints is also an effort to find the subtle difference between the subject itself and the sense he caught. The touches of brush containing regular breaths with a little excitement not only grope around the surface of the world and confirm the physical substances, but also construct the pathway to the hidden side of those matters. Lee’s paintings, fumbling on the skin of the world to detect and feel the strange unreality, provide a new point of view for us to see the reality covered by our habits. A painting is, after all, a ‘struggle against our daily vision.’

Young Taek Park (Professor of Kyonggi University, Art Critic)