Painting Contradicts Limits
Somi Sim
For Heejoon Lee, the conditions and limitations of painting are explored on the same level. In his paintings that have dealt with urban and architectural interests in the abstract language since 2016, the relationship between screen composition and quality has been maintained in an understated sense. The changes in such work style began with The Tourist in 2020 and were fully rendered in his solo exhibition Image Architect in 2021. On one hand, his former color plane abstract paintings have explored abstract languages with geometric compositions based on points, lines, and planes. Since then, his work has been pursued as a formal challenge within a frame by composing a pictorial plane in which images and paintings are juxtaposed through the photo collage method. The 2022 solo exhibition Heejoon Lee held in the following year expanded the formal experiments of painting to photography, sculpture, and spatial dimensions, including color plane abstractions, photo collages, and small three-dimensional pieces. Furthermore, the spatial installation work he introduced as the O.P.E.N. Project during the open studio of the Seoul Art Space Geumcheon (SASG) in 2022 has discovered the possibility of abstract language latent in material and space, reinterpreting the relationship between architectural elements and pictorial frames as a temporary variable space using felt cloth. His works, which span over various dimensions like the plane, three-dimension, and space, are basically based on the formal conditions of abstraction and aim to return the path to today's abstract thinking and practices to the frame of paintings. This writing attempts to approach the contemporary possibility of rediscovered abstraction by especially analyzing the recent full-fledged photo collage paintings, Image Architect series (2021-), from his plastic art experiments.
Salt, Palm, and Green, acrylic and photo-collage on canvas, 160x160cm, 2022
Reconstruction no.1-3, colored pencil and photo collage on paper, 15x15x15cm each, 2022
Unlike how contemporary paintings are seeking to break away from the canvas frame and make various formal variations, Lee has preferred to trap himself in the canvas's standardized frame. Moreover, the canvases that he usually uses are distinctively square and equally proportioned. These qualities delve into the conditions of flatness that deny the inflow of depth, perspective, and the illusion of the pictorial plane given by the vertically or horizontally long canvases. The square pictorial planes, which are usually 260×260cm, 160×160cm, or 45.5×45.5cm, are a basic framework reminiscent of the narrative and sense of absolute and intuitive abstraction contained in a square. The way he introduces images in the reductive frame of painting follows a formal experiment that gives fluidity and variability to the canvas by arranging thin two-dimensional planes of paper. If you take a closer look at his work, where acrylic paints and black-and-white photographs form one pictorial plane, you can see that the photographs are not attached as a single image and that they are actually filled with separate A4 paper. Depending on the size of the canvas, more than 100 sheets of A4 paper are attached, and this repeatedly aligned arrangement of black-and-white images is related to the process of reconstructing the frame of the images into the frame of the painting. This process of integrating canvas, paper, and ink leads to another support for painting that interacts with materials through the artist's physical intervention and repeated labor.Mossy Terracotta,
acrylic and photo-collage on canvas, 100x100cm,
2022
Furthermore, when you take a close look at the relationship between the image formed on the pictorial plane and the painting, the printed photo images usually contain traces of the architecture photographed by the artist in his daily life. It focuses on the characteristics of the space left behind around the exhibition space that forms the art system or contains his delicate views on the form, shape, color, texture, and structure of buildings, such as the geometricality and the sensation of materials of common and ordinary architecture from his daily life as well as impressive architectures he came across during his travels. At this time, the totality of the black-and-white images printed section by section and attached is severely ruptured on the canvas, and the subtle error inside the image he intended in the arrangement is an element that breaks down the uniformity of form and perception. The pictorial traces on top of the piece created by the artist using a squeegee once again disrupt the illusion of a pixel-dominated space, evoking tension between imperfections and perfection on the pictorial plane while eliciting sensational order. In addition, the abstract language contained in points, lines, and planes causes the visual sense and memory dislocated from the image to form new information values. The composition and texture of architectural spaces and the cold nature of the digital image are converted into the experience of painting through the process of abstraction. At this time, the transition of experience is the process of experiencing the material dimension as the dimension of non-material (digital) images, then as the property of painting. The painting completed through this process inversely presents a path towards the experience of sensing three-dimensional space again from the strict frame conditions. The traces of the paintings formed in this manner not only intuitively adhere to the distant dimension's landscape of space on the pictorial plane, but also present the path of abstract language as a motivation to question the image recognition system familiar to contemporaries.White Crema,
acrylic and photo-collage on canvas, 100x100cm,
2022
The transitions in Lee's recent paintings have been challenging the frame that previously defined painting through flexible channels such as the reinterpretation of image experiences through photo collages and a pictorial approach to decomposing digital images. Each time when he does, he questions the dominant order that established his paintings, and as a pictorial experiment that violates and contradicts them, he has actively introduced images, physical properties, and spatial elements as new materials. In his artist note he said,“I think in today's faster and clearer development, abstractions convey little information and unclear messages on the contrary.”The conditions of abstraction noted by the artist are attempted against the presence of excessive images, the specificity of flooding images, and the feed of unrecognizable image consumption in the digital society. His pictorial challenges, which exclusively possess the conditions of contemporary images, reconstruct the empirical dimensions of abstract language through the paradox inside the frame, while inheriting some of the solid formal conditions formed by the history of abstraction. Through such a series of processes of contrasting, dividing, and layering the dimensions of contemporary space and images, his paintings overcome the conditions and limits of the frame and open the door to the possibility and experience of abstraction attempted on the other side of the real-time image world.
Somi Sim (independent curator)
Somi Sim is an independent curator based in Seoul and Paris. She has dealt with a curatorial methodology that brings together research and practice in exhibitions, public interventions and publishing. She was awarded the 2021 Young Artist of the Year Award (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Korea, 2021), the Hyundai Blue Prize Design 2021 and the Lee Dong Seok Curatorial Award (2018). She is an editorial board member of journal of cultural theories, ‘Culture/Science’ and also active in “Re-tracing Buro”, an urban research collective. Her recent publications include Curating the Pandemic and Drifting Nearby : transition of the public in a post-pandemic city.
