Artist: Sea Hyun Lee

Sea Hyun Lee's process is something I can relate to in my own work. His paintings show landscapes of North and South Korea, but do not aim to be political. They deal with his own sense of loss and put forward ideas about nostalgia and utopia. I like to learn about artists who are dealing with subject I can relate to but use processes to express there ideas and create that are visually very different than mine. 


Quotes:
"Lee is of course concerned with vanishings; these are paintings of a lost past, of disappearing landscapes and eroding memories. “The landscape no longer exists, and so I have to paint it,” Lee explains. But his paintings are never simply about the longing to recover the past. They are, instead, about the very process of reconstitution itself. They are concerned with a trauma that is not necessarily located in the past, but that is perhaps instead located in the endless attempt to recapitulate the past."
-from Union Gallery's website


"This is where the emotional power of Lee’s paintings resides - in their depiction of trauma, but also in their depiction of the devices we use to refute the fact and the evidence of that trauma. The human compulsion towards narratives of wholeness and totality is rendered with an acute awareness of its futility, as well as its potential to achieve a kind of grace. Lee represents both the landscape of fragmentation and the restored landscape of completion in equal measure."
-from Union Gallery's website

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