Fill Your Daily Life and Empty Your Mind Once in your life, you would find yourself standing at the bow of a boat. Looking at the depth of the sea, you are there to bid farewell to all your past time, as well as this very last moment. A question arises: Are those who are going to leave thinking also of those who are to be left behind? Lee Sungmi’s solo exhibition “Empty to be Filled” at Gana Art Center is about the story of a person who has been left since then.

Being Broken_Rising up

The fingers of the artist who is sitting at the working table with her head drooped, pasting pieces of broken glass from auto salvage yards, are moving in a regular rhythm. The apparently endless arrangement and repetition are occasionally interrupted by the passing state of absence of ego when her sense of self totally disappears. This tediously long repetition results in thousands of little light blue twinkles, which then form into her pale and haughty Empty to be filled (Let it go… It will be filled again… 07142012(2012) like a big full moon. This jade green-colored piece, which has silently risen in cries of shattered glass, could be regarded as an implicit and comprehensive epitome of the artist’s works so far. To begin with, it is just so in that it uses glass fragments from smashed car windows. By sheer chance, she became interested in broken glass. One day when she was on her way out to take her dog for a walk, she happened to see pieces of shattered glass scattered in the corner of a street in Brooklyn. Suddenly the thought flashed into her mind that those transparent but worthless, deserted, and broken pieces were like a reflection of herself—an awkward outsider in a strange country. This sympathy or identification with thrown away objects was going to be a key feature that would distinguish Lee from other Korean artists who try to secure their identity in a defensive way. Soon after it, she turned her efforts to express herself with concrete media like broken glass as a way of projecting her individual identity as an ‘artist’ and ‘Asian-born woman,’ onto her artwork, rather than abstractly referred to such infertile concepts as ‘nation’ or ‘tradition.’ Furthermore, inspired by the sentiments she felt toward those feeble and thrown away items, she could gradually develop her visual language in the process of reinterpreting and recreating them. Lee accordingly never finds it boring or laborious to repeat the same work with bits of glass she got from auto salvage yard workers or the glass from broken windows of cars damaged by accidents. She enjoys it like doing a jigsaw puzzle. It seems that the artist takes the greatest pleasure in finding out new meanings in unsightly things, drawing out sorrows hidden deep within them, and sending their beautiful aspects up into the real space. Quite unexpectedly, her works produced in this way, although seemingly very solemn and solid, are not as heavy as they look. This is because their supports were made of light Styrofoam. Upon the surface of them, the artist repeatedly and intensively arranges dust-like pieces with her hands to let them find their way to build up a certain area, until those dim glitters gather together to emit a glow. It is at this moment when her work reveals the aesthetics of light through the chasm opening up momentarily in a discord between balance and imbalance. The chasm was also found as early as in Diary of Fall 04 (2004), a work with a huge amount of thin rectangular sheets of glass standing vertically. These little shards, huddled so closely together, formed a round shape which looked like a pond or a piece of the sky fallen to the ground. However, a longer and closer investigation will show that the circular shape represents a mirror of mental imagery. As if reflecting the artist’s sharp attitude at that time toward the world, Diary of Fall 04 seems to warn that “if you come close to me and stretch out your hands or step into me, I will cut you down.” On the contrary, The Burden in Different Perspectives: 04132012 (2012) on display in this exhibition, shows off a more flexible and stronger shape of a black stalactite. In line with the “Melting” series shown first in her 2010 solo show at Gana Art New York, The Burden offers the most concrete representation of her mind in all the works in this 2012 exhibition. However, unlike the series which required the repeated process of melting and accumulating to create lumps of coagulated mucus or tears or big jade-colored icicles with the trace of old wounds, The Burden was produced as if drawing with objects. In some respect, it was a visual evidence of her sense of loss. The unexpected death of her father whom she had depended on and loved the most drove her into a deep sense of loss and grief, but she had to eat, sleep, work, and hold an exhibition in the turmoil of it. The love you received from your parents breeds an ability to maintain your own dignity deep in your heart, which brings up a child into a responsible adult. It must have been so painful to her that she had to send away her father, the source of her self-respect, without saying goodbye, but, cruelly, it is a moment that all living things under the sun should meet someday as a part of nature. She too hoped that her sense of loss would become secretions like tears, to be accumulated, frozen, melt, and then naturally drained away or gone into the moment of ease, but what she was ultimately left with were cocoon-like danglers made of countless layers of her wounds. After returning to the familiar but strange working environment in Korea, this piece was given a new form with shattered car glass affixed to Styrofoam in The Burden. According to the artist, the piece was not only an expression of her heart’s complaint or pressure, rather than of grief, but also like a diary only for herself. At first glance, you may be overwhelmed by a group of huge jet black canine tooth-like shapes coming from the ceiling, but from a little different angle, you will also find splendid and beautiful chandeliers studded with thousands of pieces of black onyx. Worthless materials are reborn as something much more elaborate and stunning. And the artist mutters to herself that this is the very reason why she is living. In this way, Lee presents works with far more geometric and refined forms in this exhibition. Empty to be filled (It really hurts: Jan.8, 2012), a three-piece work composed of three discs representing the change of the moon, is also a concrete expression of what was going on inside her. ‘To empty to be filled’ may sound ironic, but it may be much more in conformity with the nature of man who, as a part of nature, follows the far greater principle of how the universe works by letting go of his own reality. Furthermore, it could be also a portrait of man who, as a broken and shattered being, may seem to be useless and weak when seen in close-up, but equally be splendid and beautiful from a different perspective. Indeed, she has been submerged in the deepest of waters and now is beginning to rise up from her own stage of being broken.....  

Emptying_Filling

Sorrow will never disappear. It just goes deeper and deeper to your heart. In Dreaming of You (2012), some white objects lie scattered on a round circle like petals on a pond. It makes you think of Jaemangmae Song, an ancient Korean poem about mourning a sister’s death and offering flowers to her. In the case of the artist, she ‘spouted out’ her grief for the absence and loss of her father in her drawings, which built a foundation for the works mentioned so far. Those drawings may be likened to a kind of ‘diary to be seen with the eyes’ or a record of her ‘empty heart’ surrounded by her daily life that seemed to calmly go on and on in the state of losing someone dear to her. For example, in Reactivation in April (2012), Lee drew countless concentric circles on transfer paper. As if constantly spinning a ring, she seemingly endlessly repeated drawing circles to pray for the repose of his father’s soul. Because Mylar paper does not absorb paints, the artist had to also repeat the process of drawing in oil pen, drying, waiting and then drawing again. It was in itself a very significant process to her. Nevertheless, Lee could still not stand the daily life in Brooklyn where everything was just the same as before and had to return to Korea to escape from it. But even here she found herself weighed down by the grief, or a burden to be unladed. In order to get rid of the burden this time, she again began to fill her daily life with her works and empty her mind through them. Empty to be Filled (30 days practice) (2012) is one of the results of such efforts. The work, which was produced for 30 days as is suggested by the title, may seem to consist of the same pieces cast in the same square mould, but they are, in fact, made one by one by hand. The circles within the squares all have unique imperfect shapes, which suggest different images to different people, such as the moon, a well, and the sand in a desert. Some viewers say that they seem to represent the waxing or waning of the moon, or water in the heart, to reflect their state of mind. In another work in the same series, Empty to be Filled (Under the surface: Feb.09, 2012) (2012), the white discs have little thin silicon feet swarming on the other side. These feeble, transparent feet under the surface of a circle, as a symbol for the cycle of life, seems to say that everybody carries the burden of sorrow on his back. In this way, not by giving concrete stories and shapes to her personal experience of loss and distress, Lee rather allows viewers to read bigger and more universal meanings in it. In front of her works, they are made to confront the depths of the abyss in their unconsciousness, which is then projected onto an image reflecting their mind like a mirror to be uttered as various interpretations. This could hardly be expected in her earlier works made of sharp pieces of glass. As she herself said, it really seems that she has moved far away from the uneasiness. Therefore, seeing her works with which she filled each day in order to empty her pain of grief and loss in the cycle of life and death, we too feel like praying that her new days will grow out wholly.

Soojung Kang (Senior Curator, National Museum of Contemporary Art)