Myung-Gyun You
47x44cm_Fibers and mixed media on fabric_2021
The eternal silence of infinite space is considered as horizons that individuals, who are insignificant beings, want to return to and a wonderful moment beyond fear and comfort in the Korean sentiment. LEE & BAE is pleased to announce an exhibition of “In the Law of Nature” from April 25 to June 17, 2023, inviting artists Myung-Gyun You and Minjeong Guem, who look at nature from a different perspective but artistically express their philosophy and insights as well as a human reflection to reach this horizons. We hope the viewer experiences a world of silence that approaches the echo from the inside through this exhibition that learning the order of life in nature.
Myung-Gyun You’s work is reminiscent of words such as the shape of Mother Nature, the way of being and the spread. His work as a painting is like a world of flow in which the flow of time and the spread of space are integrated and as a three-dimensional structure, it is like the world of roots that can be seen deep underground or the original world of life. No human trace can be found in his work. His interest lies in the spatiotemporal spread of ‘life’ that coexists with nature, naturalizes with nature, and away from the human-centered way of existence. The artist recognizes himself as an individual in nature, the most fundamental horizon as a creature and deviated from the will or thought of the individual and focuses only on the echo from pure nature, the source of life. The artist’s “nature,” which began by collecting various soil throughout the United States, is reproduced as a fine and pure textured lipid using pure fiber materials. It is enough to realize the sublime nature’s providence in the face of the overwhelming scale of the work and to experience a return to the space and time of the beginning.
For Minjeong Guem, nature is a memory, an emotion, and a philosophy of life. This is why the artist should immerse herself in nature. The artist expresses nature in her own way by evoking and sensing the nature in the past that the place remembers in a specific place. ‘Video Sculpture’ the video, which is the movement of light, is considered as a sculptural material and created by combining architectural materials such as wood and soil, is a new space sculpture and images become one with video images that visualize psychological experience or emotions about space. The artist’s video work replaces the artist’s feelings in the place with basic shapes and then mixes and fuses the actual images of the natural environment and reproduces graphically with the figure to express the movement of natural phenomena. By incorporating certain modes of movement into the actual nature that was created, her work talks about the attributes of human are emotion that feels nature.
LEE & BAE Collection is to clarify the direction of the gallery. LEE & BAE has been collecting and exhibiting artworks with a focus on contemporary Korean art and continuously reinterpreting or redefining the artworks in our collection.
LEE & BAE executes the Young Korean Artist program from 2023 to select one promising young artist who will lead the future of Korean art and provide opportunities for sponsorship and exhibition. Artist Siwon Ghim, who explores the independent freedom of humans and the conviction of intuition by the expansion of the human body and senses, is selected as the artist of the year and the exhibition is held from January 11th to February 11th, 2023, titled ’From Immersion To Emersion'. In this exhibition, we hope that the works that question the fundamentals of human beings, the process of questioning, and the circumstances of undergoing these processes, such as dismantling, frustration, and expression of emotions arouse sympathy from the viewers. Siwon Ghim's painting is a process and result of the artist herself exploring communication with the world. Various sensory signals of the body stimulate the skin, that is, the canvas, to fit or overlap each other, revealing the artist's ego. Voluntary will and unconscious desire create meaning through the canvas. Text that acts both visually and linguistically is the speaking of the body while revealing the form of moving emotions. What the artist feels in the field where the body's trajectory remains intact is none other than freedom and the joy of immersion. The artist paints the moment when one context is stacked once and converted into a completely different scene. In other words, the artist's work, which finds appropriate boundaries by repeating context-making and context-breaking, is expressed in a simple and strong form in which only intuitive senses are alive, and boldly allows even unpredictable parts of a new language. Through the artistic interface of painting, the meeting between the artist herself and the real world will expand and deepen in the future. It is a task not only for the artist but also for all of us to recognize and improve the new self by focusing on the essential questions of the inner self without ignoring the meaning of instant contact. Only when each person wakes up their paralyzed senses and communicates, people can form healthy human relationships and improve themselves through reflection. The artist, Siwon Ghim, expands her senses and explores constant movement through painting, at the same time presents fundamental questions and solutions about human nature to modern people who suffer from the gap between self and reality. Siwon Ghim was born in Seocheon, Chungcheongnam-do in 1988. She majored in English linguistics at University College London and majored in painting at The Slade School of Fine Art which is the Graduate School of UCL, and graduated as the best student. She returned to Korea in 2014 and has been working in Korea until now. With the first domestic solo exhibition in 2018, she is continuing numbers of group and solo exhibitions. She is recognized for her workability by electing to the Galleries Association of Korea’s special exhibition contest of new artists in 2022 and is considered a promising artist to lead Korean art.
LEE & BAE is pleased to announce an exhibition of ‘The Essence of Painting’ from November 4th to December 12th, 2022. Jinwook Yeom and Woolim Lee, who are recognized by domestic and foreign art critics, present their works to Korean art lovers first ahead of the significant overseas exhibition with LEE & BAE in 2023. In this exhibition which consists of non-sale works, the viewers can appreciate the works of two competent artists in advance, and along with the support we expect that Jinwook Yeom and Woolim Lee play a major role in introducing the excellence of Korean art in the global art market. The mountain is stored in memory as beautiful scenery, or many different familiar and ordinary shapes. Jinwook Yeom’s ‘Memory of Mountain’ series is reproduced on a quiet but dynamic canvas and shows the essence of painting. On the canvas, countless planted trees, overlapping forests, fog across them, and spaces such as roads are located flexibly. The boundaries between things and things, and the viewer and what the viewer sees are ambiguous. A solid mountain that sways slowly with the flow of wind and air, a mountain in reality but passes by without being caught, a mountain painted deeply within and exists as an abstract image that seems continuous but not continuous, all this ungraspable scenery of time and space comes as another mountain and now we can experience the mountain as a pictorial representation that leads us to recall and perceive. Woolim Lee’s ‘In the Woods’ series, which expresses a dreamlike space where reality and imagination exist together under the theme of ‘dream,’ presents works that cross the boundary between real and unreal through extremely realistic objects such as woods and characters. Various emotional variations are attempted in a space where reality and imagination are vaguely mixed. The harmony of peacefulness, friendliness, and unfamiliarity with tension in reality releases new energy that breaks the boundary between reality and imagination. A new space is created between gaps by crossing the boundaries between dreams and reality and giving full play to infinite imagination which the concept of time has disappeared. Space-time on the canvas crosses another space by flowing down along the background and character, repeating come and back from one world to another world, and connecting without distinction between reality and imagination, fiction and reality, and inside and outside.