- A review of Lee, Yang Sun's solo exhibition -
Ok, Young Sik
(Art Critic)
November, 1993
The world is a net weaved in connections among people. Artists have a "fateful encounter" in a different sense. It can be a human meeting that will be a decisive chance to change one's creative life, an encounter with travel experiences or works, or an encounter with impressions or materials stuck in the mind. If an artist opens his or her eyes after his or her soul wakes up from a certain encounter that passes like a lightening in daily life, it can be called fateful.
Lee, Yang Sun was fascinated by the Dancheong patterns found in the old traditional Buddhist temples, refusing all the other materials. She has demonstrated her unvarying will to dig deep into the bottom of its beauty, being attracted to the significance of its colors, vitality and patterns. Here, one can predict the flow of her fate as an artist.
The Dancheong patterns that have fascinated her are not something new at all. They are not worth much attention since they have been part of old materials dealt with by many people. She has bee, however, attracted to them by inexplicable work of mind. Her "fundamental orientation" toward them is not something to be found in other artists. She finds the unchanged nature of Korean aesthetics, throbbing "flow" of life and desire for expression in Dancheong of old colors, which means that no one can dismiss it as a material that has faded away. Looking into Lee's works that have been connected through the proposition of "flow," I can see she has made a leap from the early stage, in which she read iconography and decorated a screen based on her experiences with Dancheong patterns, to the stage of trimming her own patterns of consciousness gradually.
The traces of experiences that she had with the traditional Dancheong patterns are comparable to the achievements of the unchanged nature of Korean aesthetics.
There are no clear reasonable arguments about the essential unchanged nature of Korean aesthetics, but Lee seems to be aware of its part.
She has had communion with bits of Korean aesthetics such as generous virtue, flexible softness, bright and clear transparency, subtle texture, and lively tension. Lee does not embody these experiential values into whole living organisms but is inclined toward their organization as individual fragments, thus showing signs of ideation. This show how much interested she is in the pursuit of essential unchanged nature to make such partial values possible. Her conscious path is well demonstrated in her recent Lotus Flower series. In other words, she has moved from the early stage of reading and appreciating the iconography of lotus flowers in Dancheong patterns gradually to the stage of making an approach to lotus flowers in reality. She has reached a stage of identifying the symbol of "that something" found in Dancheong with "lotus flowers" in reality.
Will she have an encounter with the expression of unchanged nature of Korean aesthetics around the groups of lotus flowers in bloom and with the shadow of her own unchanged nature? In her recent Lotus Flower series, she controls her complex consciousness and recognizes balance, depth and height. These changing aspects of her consciousness are found in the flexible flow of lotus leaves and the straight rising of lotus stems.
It is not an everyday occurrence to figure out the principle of a lotus flower blossoming. I believe Lee's painting of lotus flowers represents the preliminary fluttering before the blossoming of a lotus flower. I can also say again that the discovery of unchanged nature of Korean aesthetics will happen in the "news of lotus flower in bloom." How can one recognize the identity of Korean art and have a clear intuition into the true of living things without such effort?
It means that the unchanged nature of lotus flowers is my unchanged nature and also that of Korean aesthetics.
× × × ×
"There was a building even before the Heaven and Earth
It had no form, being tranquil from the beginning.
It becomes the master of all things.
It never withers throughout the four seasons."
(Junggwan Haean)