Lee Woolim(LEE & BAE)
Summary
Motifs associated with blue and white porcelain from the Joseon Dynasty and genre paintings are often found in Woolim Lee’s paintings. Ceramic designs sometimes become patterns on figures or animals in his paintings, and figures in genre paintings themselves become the main protagonists of Lee’s works. Through paintings that portray the combination and hybridity of the East and the West, past and present, and reality and imagination, Woolim Lee creates a lazy, vague, and surreal image on the canvas.
Woolim Lee was born in Sacheon, Gyeongsangnam-do in 1972 and studied Western painting at Yeungnam University. He also earned his graduate degree at the same university. Lee began to draw attention from critics upon being named the Kumho Young Artist in 2006, and he has held a number of solo and group exhibitions at leading galleries at home and abroad. Lee has also participated in many domestic and international art fairs including those in Beijing, Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. His works are part of the Seoul Museum of Art and Kumho Museum of Art collections, and he has secured a domestic and foreign collector base with his original and thoughtful methods of artistic expression. Woolim Lee’s work has continued to develop amid the interest of art lovers and art connoisseurs around the world at art fairs, and he presents another kind of dreamy and surreal world that we couldn’t possibly imagine.
Woolim LEE, 〈Spring〉, 2018, oil on canvas, 100 x 130.3 cm.
Woolim LEE, 〈Summer〉, 2017, oil on canvas, 150 x 194 cm.
The characters in the paintings are staring at one point with faces that lack expression or are only showing their backs. A green forest unfolds on the canvas. The woman’s clothes and animals are decorated with colorful flower patterns. Lee’s expressions are bold. Sometimes they are elaborate and at others, they are boldly omitted or appropriated, making us wonder if there is a limit to expression. The size of the canvas doesn’t matter so much to the artist. He also let the woman in the canvas walk out as a sculpture. This woman confronts the audience with a fluttering gesture, as if she is walking on the border between reality and non-reality, with her face covered, acting as though she may or may not show her face. In this way, the artist stirs up a sense of strangeness by bringing something unfamiliar into existence among things we are familiar with, while also creating a surreal atmosphere wrapped in subtle tension. Lee’s works seem to represent the human psychology that admires and imagines the ideal world as a fantastical space that crosses the boundary between reality and non-reality.
Woolim LEE, 〈A Walk〉, 2019, Resin, Resin, oil on canvas, 97 x 130.3 cm.
Woolim Lee’s portraits, which usually portray images of one or sometimes two characters, are presented like still life paintings. His figure paintings present a woman with a porcelain-shaped body, covered with images of flowers and all sorts of other patterns, who hides her face and only lets us see her back. Figures in Lee’s portraits lack expression on their faces and their blueish gray colored skin only makes them appear more like “inorganic, still objects.” One of the most representative paintings from the early days of his career is a painting of a crouched man. He is also perceived like a porcelain object because of the way his hands and feet are held together, and his tightly shut eyes and mouth summarize the complex narrative into a simple one.
Paintings that look almost identical appear in his painting series of different titles. This reminds us of the original form of art or the origin of greatly favored paintings that did not place much emphasis on the content or theme conveyed by the title nor limit themselves to the boundary set by their titles, but rather focused on the visual effect and decorative value of their first impression