Arario Gallery Seoul Samcheong is pleased to present The Monstrous, a solo exhibition by Seungae Lee, which is to open on August 31st, 2012. This is a solo exhibition Lee is having in 4 years since her last solo exhibition The Monster at Arario Gallery Seoul Samcheong. The monsters that Lee created in the past captured the dark psychological conditions found deep in human psyche, drawing a profound sense of connection from her audience. In The Monstrous, Lee presents a much more complex and organized structure than what she has shown in her drawings, as well as another kind of monsters that belong to the social structure of this contemporary age.

Seungae Lee (b. 1979) is a female artist acclaimed for her unique drawings using only pencil on paper. Lee expressed that she uses pencil because it’s the most delicate medium that’s easily broken and smudged. The monsters that Lee creates are beings that confront the most vulnerable feelings found deep within the human psyche. As a result, the artist chose to work with the delicate medium of paper and pencil to create such beings. Lee’s monsters from her previous works fought with various negative emotions in man’s inner world, and were completely a figment of Lee’s imagination. Whenever feelings of sadness of fear are stirred in human, the monsters either remove those feelings or combat them with a sense of duty. Therefore, each part of their body is most appropriately evolved or specialized for the single purpose it serves. Another kind of monsters that Lee has created speaks for the ‘minority’ in reality. The artist’s sympathy for socially weak such as homeless or street kids take the form of very small, scrawny monsters. Each of the monster in the series is frail and weak, with leathery skin over their bones. They’re as dry as mummies and their wings have crumbled to the ground. Lee has sampled them and encased them in boxes or picture frames.

As opposed to Lee’s previous works which created monsters that react to deep emotional conditions and aroused sympathy and bonding, Lee’s works in this exhibition have a much more social and realistic aspect. The new works consist of drawings that release the artist’s aspirations and efforts to reclaim her own identity and social position in real life. Consequently, the new works take on a more complicated social structure as opposed to her past works that captured individual monsters, and her focus on dark emotional states has shifted to that on optimism and determination. Also, the characters in her new works base themselves on realistic entities rather than being completely new and foreign. At a glance they seem like trees or plants, and have attribute of mutants that repeatedly reproduce and mutate, such as the monster with a tree for its upper half of the body and a deer for its lower half. While Lee’s previous works mainly consisted of rendering figures with forms based on the characteristics of individual monsters, this exhibition demonstrates many elements within each work assimilating into each other to make one narrative. It’s as if elements of images from Middle Ages or Renaissance have come together to convey a story with a theme like a text. Scattered throughout the drawings are codes created through the artist’s exchanges with the monsters, and the background is suggested as a stage. Multiple monsters entangle each other or maintain their own positions in a staged background, and the narratives of each monster combine to make a certain world. In this concern, if Lee’s previous works were more of a portrait of the monsters, her works in this exhibition are more like a ‘monsterscape’.

Seungae Lee (b. 1979) graduated with a BFA in Painting from Sungshin Women’s University, and has held solo exhibitions at Gallery Hyundai in 2005, Do-Art Gallery in 2006, and Arario Gallery Seoul Samcheong in 2008. Lee has also participated in many group exhibitions in various galleries and museums including Gallery Live & Moris in Japan in 2008, Ilmin Museum of Art and Seoul Museum of Art in 2009, and Soma Museum of Art in 2011. The Monstrous exhibition at Arario Gallery Seoul Samcheong is Lee’s first solo exhibition in 4 years. Lee is also participating in the 2012 Guangzhou Triennial.