Sojung Lee(GALLERY2)
Sojung Lee adjusts and finds balance between the autonomy of image and artist’s control. She gives inevitable structure to images that arise through coincidence. Lee contemplates the balance and harmony created through the utilization or control of images that prolierate on their own.
Sojung Lee (b.1979) has been creating organic abstract works based on the brush and ink style of oriental paintings. Forms and figures from earlier works would lead to her next work, and this would process would repeat itself, creating a perpetual pattern of succession and proliferation. In the works presented here, Lee follows the incidental trail left by the previous painting series (wrinkles on Korean custom-made hanji paper caused by uneven drying, etc.), as if it were a template. In carrying out the iterative process, fortuitous traces once again find a place on the image plane. Lee guides and controls those traces, and goes on to find form and narrative so they can become a necessity.
Sojung Lee, 〈Petal〉, 2019, gouache, ink, acrylic on paper, 53.1 x 65.3 cm.
Sojung Lee, 〈Petal〉, 2019, gouache, ink, acrylic on paper, 53.1 x 65.3 cm.
Sojung Lee has been creating organic abstract works based on the brush and ink technique of oriental paintings. Forms and figures that appeared in previous works become the source of her next work, as it repeats the process of succession and proliferation. The artist who has been creating new images based on coincidental forms now attempts to create an inevitable necessity by replicating coincidence. Works presented in Hinges result from using coincidental shapes of by-products used in the production of previous works as new frames and creating another coincidence on the image plane.
In an earlier series titled Detectives, Lee laid hanji (Korean mulberry paper) over jangji (Korean paper), and then removed it after applying color and ink over it. She then sought to discover forms among the traces of paint and ink that smeared through hanji. Sheets of hanji that functioned as filters eventually dried and piled up, with wrinkles and creases that were naturally created. Lee placed these on another surface to use them as templates for reproducing coincidence and created “intended coincidences” by applying color and ink over them again.
When intention intervenes in the process of making coincidence, “inevitable necessity” is bound to be created. In order to make this “coincidental” again, the artist covers it up with a thick layer of acrylic paint. In doing so, she creates a border between form and margin, and makes that chunk of form stand out. In other words, as the process of using coincidental elements as templates for another work is iterated, a part that’s been coincidentally created becomes an inevitable and necessary element, and another coincidence is born through that inevitable creation.
Coincidence exists because it can’t be duplicated or reproduced. However, coincidence exists in replicated forms in Sojung Lee’s works.
Sojung Lee, 〈Petal〉, 2020, gouache, ink, acrylic on paper, 85 x 85 cm.
“Through my experience of giving birth and raising a child, I came to think that all of us came into this world by an incredible chance of coincidence, though it feels like we are here because we were meant to be here. Each individual becomes an inevitable necessity as they establish relationships with someone or something in their own ways. This concept has been on point with the question that had been the foundation of my work and practice thus far. The process of creating an inevitable scene by assisting or controlling the coincidental traces or self-generative images created by coincidence on an empty page without rough sketches always goes back and forth between coincidence and inevitable necessity. We can say that exhibition visitors also establish coincidental relationships with the works on view. I hope that visitors will not stop there, but go on to examine each and every element of the paintings and experience their individual coincidences and inevitable necessities.“ – Sojung Lee
– Exhibition Text, Hinges, P21