Auf und Ab (2022)
A-young Kim (Curator)
Translated from the original Korean
In this exhibition, his first solo show since returning to Korea, artist Eunu Lee begins with the question, “What is the difference between the three-dimensional and the two-dimensional?” and presents works that refuse any fixed categorization of genre. At the same time, by revealing long-standing themes in his practice—such as “the concept of history as something that emerges” and “elements concealed within surface and interior”—he challenges and destabilizes socially accepted standards and conventions.
In works such as Einklang (Unison) and Abendrot (Afterglow), forms created through the accumulation of layered color emerge prominently. These works are grounded in a sculptural language based on subtraction, similar to relief carving, in which material is gradually reduced through cutting. Built through the repeated process of layering and hardening multiple colors of paint and subsequently carving them away with sculptural tools, the works embody an accumulation of material and time. Their surfaces are marked by a refined and delicate tension. Within this structure, the sequential order of color layers carries no inherent narrative significance; rather, it is the sudden estrangement produced by the sculptural act of carving into what initially appears as a painted surface that becomes central. Through this process, the artist’s persistent and almost obsessive approach to the object transforms into a form of destruction that reveals what has been concealed through sedimentation. The colors and images composing the surface are thus placed in a state of instability and transformation. Through his distinctive sculptural language, which introduces a separation between material and method, the artist reflects upon the question: “What distinguishes the three-dimensional from the two-dimensional?”
In Julia Sammer (2015) and Untitled (2016), the artist removes the surface of printed photographs using chemical substances, collapsing their pixel structure and attempting to transform them into painting. Digitally printed photographic images are erased or abraded using solvents and sandpaper, and subsequently reworked with paint and ink. Fragments of time once fixed within photography become reanimated through the traces of the artist’s gestures, acquiring painterly qualities. Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, the artist’s touch constructs images only to disperse them again, while the residual traces of the original image continuously recall what the artist has seen.
The video work Verbrannt Serie 2 (Burned Series 2) (2017) documents the process in which a single flower, struggling to survive between paving stones, is ultimately consumed and extinguished by fire. Swaying in increasingly forceful winds, the flower dries, burns, and is reduced to ash. The artist focuses on abnormal situations that emerge subtly and almost unnoticed—such as when natural elements are discovered within artificial environments. The atmosphere generated by such heterogeneous conjunctions brings into focus elements that would otherwise remain unseen, dissolving boundaries and enabling new visual discoveries and expressions. At the same time, this can be understood as a metaphor for the artist himself, who once existed as an outsider, displaced from his original world and situated within an unfamiliar environment.
The video work “Mountains are many and fields are few; the people’s character is gentle and reserved” (2022), also presented at the Gangwon Artists Triennale 2022, depicts a mountain path landscape in Jinbu, Pyeongchang, Gangwon Province, composed of individual image fragments. The pixelated image installation was positioned on a temporary wall erected in front of the remains of a building destroyed by fire behind the exhibition space in Jinbu. During his more than ten years living in Europe, the artist encountered mountainous regions in Switzerland and France whose landscapes resembled that of his hometown in Gangwon Province. This recognition led him to newly appreciate the significance of a place that had once been familiar yet overlooked, forming the conceptual starting point for this work.
In the video, an elderly man and a young girl from Jinbu assist one another in dismantling and reassembling images of the mountainous landscape. These two figures—both central subjects and silent narrators—represent the gradually diminishing elderly and youth populations of Jinbu, as documented in two reports encountered by the artist during his field research: The Demographic Structure of Gangwon Province and Its Implications (Gangwon Research Institute, 2017) and Status of Responses to Demographic Change I (Board of Audit and Inspection, 2021). For the artist, they symbolize something precious that is disappearing amid neglect and indifference. The reconstructed images are ultimately presented to viewers in forms entirely different from their original state. The music accompanying the video reverses in the latter part of the work, synchronizing with the dismantling and reconstruction of the image. For the artist, sound functions not only as a device that makes the temporality of the moving image perceptible, but also as a medium that guides the viewer into reflection.
The title itself is derived from a passage describing Gangwon Province in Taengniji (1751), a geographical treatise written by the late Joseon Silhak scholar Yi Jung-hwan. His description of a place possessing favorable geographical conditions for human habitation resonates with the artist’s own vision and aspiration for Gangwon Province. Witnessing the transformations taking place in the region under the name of progress, the artist poses a series of fundamental questions: What is history to us? What should be passed on to future generations? And what will they, in turn, pass on to those who follow?
The pixelated landscape imagery evokes the notion of nature as something constructed and assembled. The act of dismantling and reconstructing these images, performed by the elderly man and the young girl, becomes a repeated gesture that continuously returns to the artist’s central question: What must ultimately be transmitted to future generations?
This solo exhibition offers an opportunity to examine the historical development and artistic identity of Eunu Lee’s practice, which evolves from painting toward what might be described as “planar sculpture.” From a formal perspective, the artist seeks a new visual language that departs from his previous works, asserting that he refuses to be confined by any specific genre if doing so serves his artistic objectives. Questioning the criteria by which genres are defined and the boundaries that separate them becomes itself an object of artistic inquiry. Through works that reflect his interest in artificial boundaries, social standards, and nature itself, and by engaging with their inherent contradictions and ironies, the exhibition provides insight into the artist’s creative motivations, his artistic articulation of social concerns, and the personal dimensions of his lived experience—ultimately revealing the essence of his artistic practice.