Attitude that restructure a perceived phenomenon

A phenomenon is exposed everywhere as an image, but hides its substance behind the appearance of image while ordering a visual pleasure by one's looking eyes.
Then, a surface is transformed into another image according to the structure in which one's eyes are projected while functioning as a screen sometimes or a curtain sometimes. The substance of image is glimmering behind a surface with the failure to reach its perfect meaning. Artist Oh, Yong-Seok and Lee, Min-Jung to be introduced in this exhibition are taking up their method of re-composing with individual attitude of perception rather than reproducing it while paying heed to a phenomenon.

A Place as a Sign of Concealment
Oh, Young-Seok's concern for a phenomenon and hidden side is ultimately derived from a classical theme of a human being's nature. His painting is approaching the hidden side while dealing with the sign of a concealed substance which is excluded from the eyes at the scene of event and accident (image) and concealed from memories. At this time, the sign is a sentimental notice, as a sort of atmosphere captured from a phenomenon, arousing anxiety and fear.
When dealing with "Auschwitz Nazi death camp" showing the extreme of humanity, or horrible accidents covered by mass media and an image of an event, he bases his work on a place- a physical substance, viz. exposing the notice, which cannot be made into a language, from a physical vestige through a place.
A place in his painting is a starting point, which helps perceive a sign, and it arouses forgotten memories of time into the individual present. From this, he is attempting at the picturesque process to overcome the gap between a surface and a certain space from a place.
The series work having fresh pink color at this exhibition is "Tranquil Graveyard." Artist's fresh pink color rather touches the tentacles of intrinsic memories because the color is not a sensory red at the moment of flowing fresh blood of death everywhere. It creepily arouses the horror of death that has been collected in memory from the deep.
The scenery of a graveyard looks quiet, which has been so since the moments of death stained by pain and fright deep in the ground, so the present desolate peace stirs up anxiety and horror paradoxically. Like this, he is re-composing the surface of a painting by setting up it as a screen while carrying the gap between the in and out by deeply involving such a phenomenal sign emotionally.

Space, established by bodily sense
It appears that artist Lee, Min-Jung's painting technique lies in setting up the space in canvas through the basic elements in painting-dot, line, and side.
Though not looking obstinate geometrically, vertical lines and horizontal lines that can afford fission and multiplication at any time occupy a space while meeting & crossing one another, from which artist Lee, Min-Jung uses a method of creating architectural form.
At the moment diverse sorts of color and lines cross each other, it looks extemporaneous, but in closer look at this, once can discover the vestige of the surface that is piled up in layers in a moment. The present space is a vestige seriously considered by senses that have existed in each moment. In addition, a stratum of time is naturally establishing a space. As mentioned by artist Lee, "she tried to express this part in her painting as the coldness and hardness of steel while recalling a poetic word "winter is a rainbow made of steel."
Like this, even when she applies trivial lines and colors, the artist made an approach while associating a sense which she would substantially have in a three-dimensional space.
In other words, she is stretching into the space while establishing tension and harmony simultaneously by putting together the mutually heterogenous senses, such as cold, and warm, heavy and light, bright and dark at a certain moment. Here, the synesthetic association is based on bodily experiences feeling senses.
In short, it's a method where the body perceives and experiences the world.
The process, in which building an architectural skeleton through verticality, horizontality and curves, and responding to temperatures, gravity and motility through color, much resembles bodily senses. Her geometric landscape created on the basis of such bodily senses proposes the possibility of variable space which is entwined with each other, dissolved and built by breaking away from the limit of the space formed from rational logic.
Summing up the two artists' method of perceiving phenomena, Oh, Yong-Seok's painting is re-composing a place as a sign of approaching truth concealed in human beings' memory while Lee, Min-Jung's painting is spatially reproducing bodily sense through picturesque elements.
 
In spite of the different form the two artists have in their perception of phenomena, this writer could take a glance at their common attitude inquiring into the point where they can tide over the limit to human nature.
I could say that a sort of parametric space, which carries the space between a phenomenon and its inner side, ins and outs, consciousness and unconsciousness, vision and sense, and individual and world, is formed from the process of re-building a physical realm, such as space and place between the surface and vision of a painting.

Sim, So-Mi (Art Critic, Curator at Gallery Skape)