East(NY) to West(LA)

Seung Lee

December 1, 2011 - January 9, 2012

Selected Works

AndrewShire Gallery is pleased to present EAST (NY) to WEST (LA), a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Seung Lee whose paintings and drawings of extraordinary places convey poignant memories of the lost natural world, while they project concern for life in a time yet to come.

The exhibition will consist of Lee’s paintings and drawings that reference strangely familiar sites where plant life is at the center of interest—places where fantastic flora speckles each psychologically and emotionally layered setting. To create these extraordinary environments, Lee reduces the primary subject matter in each of his drawings and paintings to a stripped-down delineation that captures the essence of a single inspiration ready for contemplation. By placing an emphasis on the subject’s organic characteristics, Lee’s gesture (of stripping down) signals the spiritual delicacy of the choices we make, and how the vulnerabilities we face in daily life are always part of our connection to the natural world. It also points to our collective associations with the environments our ancestors must have faced—the same ones we squandered and lost. This lost world has become particularly surreal to us, but it is still fundamentally biological in our vast memory nature.

Using an impressive painting and drawing style, Lee’s work shows an unwaveringly well-balanced and harmonious side of the world in which we must have lived some time ago and possibly will live in again someday. He renders elegant vegetation that is designated for divinely mystical beings who are hidden to the mere mortals dominating today’s planet. In Lee’s work, one can accept that all things (organisms, plants, and creatures including humankind) exist from this secreted spiritual position, and they will eventually come to rest there again, returning to their original state within the magic of nature.

Through the use of silhouette, line, and gradation as a form of excavation, the paintings and drawings illuminate scenes and situations where the vastness of the natural world can be found tacitly buried beneath man’s unnatural artifacts. Lee’s strangely beautiful images and remarkable, nearly social, environments engage our genetic instincts (genetic memory possibly being the only true memory of the past), as they function within a new form of expression allowing for quiet insight. This conception can be seen in Under Snow I, a recent work wherein a white sheath of snowfall partially conceals the foliage beneath its cover. Another work, titled Spring Pollen, shows a sprinkle of contagion hovering in the air, but its possible infectivity is analogous to freedom and the continuation of a higher, more transcendental, form of existence than we have now.

In the past, Lee’s process was based on the reuse of discarded and leftover materials, both readymade and of his own invention. He moved back and forth between the found object and more traditional mediums to make his work—constantly repositioning his art practice. Using both street debris and his past artworks, Lee took apart then recombined found items together with his existing work. The celebration of this practice and remnants of the artist’s past are still alive in his current work.