Venue: Pibi gallery

Eunsun Lee who majored in New Media spanning the areas of sculpture, film, and video, produces works in various mediums of photography, painting, and installation both in and out of galleries and at diverse spaces, as well as holding outdoor projects. The motif for Lee’s work is “people,” exploring the points where people come together to forge relationships and the subsequently formed images of those unions.

Lee’s contemplations about “relationships” depart from the idea that people with no common denominators are brought together by way of a single medium. Among the many options out there, the artist opts to observe and visualize the making and developing of relationships through the medium of Territory Conquest, a childhood game not only familiar to her but to most Koreans growing up. The game involves players marking at spots of their choosing numerous dots in a given set area, then in the order of play, take turns drawing a line connecting two dots. When a line drawn closes an area into a triangle, the player who drew that line “conquers” the triangular area. The shape and size of the area each player comes to conquer or own is entirely unpredictable, much like the unforeseeable and erratic nature of relationships between people. To the artist, the visual process of the way Territory Conquest plays out comes across as being quite poetic, the randomly peppered dots and the lines connecting them reading to her like a rhythmical verse. While each area of the carelessly scattered dots appear to have been divided exhaustively, the newly emerging territories conversely at the same time seem to fall into a process of being forged into a massive aggregation. Those formative elements created via viewer participation, the dots, lines, surfaces and even the colorful disarray, come to represent a symbol of human relationships to the artist, spelled out through the medium of a “game.”

Her work, centered on investigating the formative beauty found in symbolic representation of relationships, had its beginnings in canvas paintings starting back in 2009 and evolved into such works whose scales elastically adapted to the given work space, 〈Nanji-scape〉 (2012) being one, where the artist taped along the lines on the ground and painted the resulting pattern on the wall, as well as the large-scaled murals 〈Kemb〉 (2013) and 〈De〉 (2014) that span 8 meters and 13 meters wide respectively. Being drawn to the shapes, and their infinitely changeable nature, that result when people get involved, Lee becomes intrigued with images recreated through paper origami. In 〈Paper blossoms〉 (2013) Lee folds paper into flowers, like a rose or a lily, then unfolds them to photograph the creased paper, an image that holds the remnants over time, as it leaves its mark on paper. By undoing what was shaped to be a flower, she is able to capture a side that is otherwise not visible, witnessing each resulting line, surface, and shade-dependent colors of the undone paper. Running along the same line are〈Card〉 (2014) and 〈Letter〉 (2014), this time utilizing Korea’s most commonly used paper size A4, folding it into the shape of a card or a letter. By shining different sources of light on the unfolded card or letter and filming the culminating color variants, the works attempt to use a new kind of language to convey relationships between people and those obscure inner emotions that words are unable to express in neither letters nor cards.

Lee has continued her work in visualizing and exploring various elements of “relationships” that have no physical appearance, and this time illuminates them through multisensory installations in her new solo exhibition, Resonance. Together with the gallery staff the artist replicates on the exhibition floor, the design of the Territory Conquest game played out on the gallery floor plan. Colorful triangles marking individual territory fill the floor, and hanging above the apexes of these geometrical shapes are long cylindrical pillars covered with acrylic mirrors. The colorful faces of the floor are projected on to the hanging surfaces, the eye-level pillars reflecting the vibrantly hued ground to confuse lookers of the depth perspective. The light and shadows reflecting downward in all angles from the hanging pillars are distractive enough to blur both the boundaries marked by the triangles and the viewing perspectives of the participants. Immersed in the tinkling of bells ringing all around, viewers walking into the piece are given a visual and auditory experience that extend well beyond the usual categories. Viewers become one with the grand landscape, their walk through the pillars physically adding waves while they gaze at the constantly wavering images.

Lee has been bringing to canvas and mural surfaces what she believes to be the symbolic images of forging relationships, adhering to a predetermined design and using a logical formative language that include dots, lines, and surfaces. For this exhibition, her focus is on the emotions and hesitations as they relate to how variables push relationships towards unexpected directions and prevent them from being considered a form of a logical communication system. Rather than being seen as an unmovable image, the artist compares it all to the phenomenon of resonance, where one form of energy meets another corresponding one, to radiate out an even larger force. The artist’s fresh attempt in symbolizing relationships brings us to the visual scene of where we can experience the building energy beneath the surface that eventually explodes beyond familiar boundaries.

Youngok Chae / PIBI GALLERY

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