Sangmin Lee
117.4x117.4x6cm_Engraved Glass and framed_2022
2023.02.22 - 2023.04.09
LEE & BAE COLLECTION_SPRING
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.
PAST EXHIBITIONS VIEW MORE
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2023 Young Korean Artist 'From Immersion To Emersion'
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.
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The Essence of Painting
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.
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The Dignity of Art
LEE & BAE is pleased to announce Hyojin Park and Sangsun Bae’s duo exhibition of The Dignity of Art from 1st September to 23rd October 2022. The dignity in art refers to the true value or the majesty of the work. Having the dignity in art is to inspire understanding, consideration, and empathy for others. In this respect, Hyojin Park’s sculpture which stained with intense colors plays a role as a very dignified medium to persuade gracefully about the directivity of life while paradoxically expressing human desires and emptiness. At the same time, Sangsun Bae’s velvet painting which constitutes the canvas with monochrome and countless lines expresses the wavelength and depth of human relationships with accumulation of time, and it is sufficient to induces not only the artist herself but also the viewer to have self-reflection. Through this exhibition, we hope to the viewer experience the true value and dignity of artwork. Artwork is a ‘spiritual and philosophical’ product made of form, color, material, technique and so on. Like humans, artworks that permeate the artist’s soul as human being have dignity. The artist gives dignity to the work she created, and the viewer shares the dignity. Like the dignity of human, the dignity of art comes from the attitude of artist toward the world. Therefore, the physical elements such as the colors and images that organize the work presents the sensuous beauty and pleasure, and it impresses the soul of the viewer. The free and delicate soul of the viewer communes with the artwork and accepts the dignity of work and makes them live a more mature life as a human being. Hyojin Park borrows various gods from Western mythology and objects that implies dignity, sacredness, elegance, and beauty such as an oriental pottery which is a high-level cultural product, at the bottom of the sculpture. And on the top of sculpture is decorated with colorful bouquets of various artificial flowers with a mixture of colored resin as if blood or tears are flowing down. Her work looks like an ideal and fancy paradise with perfect combination of objects, but the emptiness, loneliness and sadness inherent in the work cannot ne hidden. The flowers that flow down as if they were withering after blooming are expressed the foolish of human in pursuit of an illusion and transient of life well as a meta-language. The gods represented as perfect human beings and the noble potteries which reached the peak of spiritual culture, by supporting the meaningless of glamorous life with difficulty, explain very paradoxically that life is worth of proceeding yet. Sangsun Bae’s velvet painting is based on line painting and it constitutes a canvas in which faint shading appears by repeating and overlapping countless lines with diluted white gesso on black velvet. The lines that are mixed inside and out with accumulation of time represent the depth and wavelength of human relationships and it involves a deep interpretation and determination to life. The velvet painting has become a type of painting by forming one side with constantly repeating white lines in silence and concentration and spreading an infinite abyss in the black blank space without any drawing. The artist chose black velvet instead of canvas as the best material that minimizes reflection and absorbs light almost perfectly, and draw an infinite circle with gesso instead of oil paints even though it is extremely faint color of white to emphasize physical properties with solidity and structure.
