Exploring the Shared Aesthetic Surface (2024)
Eui-jeong Han (Aesthetics, Professor, Chungbuk National University)
Translated from the original Korean
The works presented by artist Eunu Lee—who experiments across a wide range of media—in the 2024 exhibition Positive, ,Negative can be broadly divided into two kinds of planar works. One is a form of color abstraction: after building up layers of acrylic paint mixed with modeling materials, he then carves and excavates them—meticulously, both by machine and by hand—revealing free forms and the colors concealed beneath the strata. The other is closer to figuration: on digitally printed photographs of landscapes and figures, he sprays a solvent that dissolves and causes the photographic pigments to bleed, thereby blurring the image (像, image). At first glance, these two bodies of work appear entirely different in type and style—layering and carving versus dissolving; abstraction versus figuration; painting versus photography; revealing versus erasing. One is led to ask what, if anything, they share in common.
A common aesthetic surface
To begin with, both bodies of work are grounded in the plane. This does not mean that an artist trained in sculpture—whose practice has primarily unfolded through three-dimensional, installation, and media works—has “returned” to the plane, nor is it meant to demonstrate his mastery of planar media. Rather, the artist understands the act of layering and carving as a kind of relief, that is, as modeling on a plane, and he often uses expressions such as “sculpting with photography,” suggesting that he has acquired a habit of grasping the plane as a volumetric field. In an era of multiple media, it is neither strange nor especially remarkable for a sculptor to present planar works. Yet through conversations with Eunu Lee, I came to think that the primary terrain of his inquiry is “surface.” Here, “surface” does not mean the flat canvas surface described by the art critic Clement Greenberg. It is closer, rather, to what the French philosopher Jacques Rancière calls “a common aesthetic surface on which signs, forms, and actions become equal.” Rancière describes the emergence of this common aesthetic surface as follows: “Poetry no longer imitates painting, and painting no longer imitates poetry. This does not mean that there are words on one side and forms on the other. (…) That is, it means that the principle that separated the arts of words and the arts of forms, the arts of time and the arts of space—dividing the place and means of each art—has been abolished, and that in place of separated domains of imitation, a common surface has been constituted.”
(Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Kim Sang-woon, Reality Culture Research, 2014, p. 190)
The surface of conversion
Eunu Lee works on a common aesthetic surface that cannot—and need not—be divided into painting, photography, and sculpture. This common surface is a site on which the techniques of painting, photography, and sculpture can all be applied, and where the “visual elements” we believe we are seeing and the “meanings” (forms) the artist seeks to convey mutually penetrate and intermingle. For this reason, reversals of established roles and functions are frequent on this surface. For example, surface color is generally understood as the color perceived by our eyes as light reflects from an object’s exterior. In Lee’s works, however, surface color functions to disclose the existence of multiple layers of color that have passed through the surface and reside deep within the object (Earth (2021), Afterglow (2021), Blue (2021), Einklang_Harmony (2021), among others). From a distance, the surface color is perceived as the hue of a sunset; yet when one excavates the strata as if surveying an archaeological site, the forms and colors buried within each layer begin to emerge. The technique of erasure, too, operates with a different function. If Gerhard Richter, by applying a blur effect to his photo-paintings, sought to erase and conceal the traumatic Real carried by the image, then Lee’s solvent-based dissolution technique in photography aims, on the contrary, to convey the reality of the subject or the factual impression of lived experience that the camera could not register (Landscape with a Roman Triumphal Arch (2015), Christina Berger (2016), Fence and Flowers (2017), Garden (2020), among others). In this way, on the common aesthetic surface that underlies Lee’s practice, none of the terms—real/virtual, figure/ground, past/present—claims absolute priority; consequently, conversions and migrations of functions unfold autonomously.
The surface of coexistence
The exploration of surface is also continuously observable in Lee’s sculptural and media works. Untitled (2018), in which the surface of a pineapple is cast in various ways in polyurethane foam and formed into a single column, and You Press the Button (2017), in which a camera, tripod, and other objects are covered over with a cement surface and become a single mass-object, are experiments in a fluid surface—one that can permeate anything and envelop anything. Lee’s media projects, which primarily address generational boundaries, surveillance and communication, the individual and society, and encounters between nature and the artificial, likewise appear as works that enable different entities and forms of existence to coexist within the artistic “commons” (To One Side (2015), Burned II (2017), Project Synopticon (2020), Mountains are many and fields are few; the people’s character is gentle and reserved (2022), among others).
The surface of encounter
The surface of coexistence that Lee attempts is also a surface upon which new encounters take place. The artist has stated that, in the process of experimenting with form through various techniques and materials, he encounters forms he did not intend. At a certain moment in the collaborative process between a CNC machine that rapidly carves through layers of paint and the artist, who fabricates the cutting tools and determines the machine’s direction of movement and the shapes it will draw, the form reveals itself. This may occur at the moment when the artist touches and refines the machine’s output by hand using tools such as sandpaper. It may also occur while the artist selectively dissolves the forms and colors automatically captured by the camera’s eye with solvents, or while, over the course of dissolution, he rubs and erases again with sandpaper, brush, and hand. Each time, an unexpected encounter is formed. Such encounters with form are moments in which the visible and the invisible meet—moments when what had been concealed pierces the surface and appears like a ghost. For the artist, and for viewers who look at Lee’s work, these moments are l’inattendu—the unexpected—and thus constitute an aesthetic experience distinct from everyday life. So that these experiences may be accumulated by each viewer, and reopened at any time as time passes, Lee has left generous space, in this exhibition, between the commas.