LEE KwangHo

The subject Lee has been working on recently are the thickets of Jeju Island called gotjawal, an indigenous form of vegetation that encompasses a wide variety of trees, vines and grass. He brings back photographs of these forests, which he gazes at intently, to transfer onto large canvases. What is it that he is doing?
This project clearly demonstrates that Lee’s work does not aim at realistic representation. The dizzy entanglement of vines and branches brings to mind the image of a primeval forest. Unlike Lee’s previous subjects, like people or cacti, the thickets do not provide a specific object of focus, blocked off and closed off from its surroundings. Trees intertwine with vines and snow-covered soil swirls around the web of roots. Here inside the thicket, living trees are indistinguishable from dead stumps, the branches from the vines that wrap around them. The entangled vines and twigs, the half-melted snow and earth, the leaves that hang low from the trees and the plants on the ground, all mix and combine into a single lump, creating a contrast with the sky in its backdrop.
This is why, strictly speaking, the mass of trees and vines that is gotjawal, is not a subject that can be “reproduced.” In order to reproduce a specific subject, one needs to stand outside of it, maintaining a certain distance to face that subject. But this is not the case with the landscape of gotjawal, for the artist stands not outside of these thickets but inside of them. All that lies inside these forests is either in front or behind the vast expanse of other bushes. Just like being underwater, where one is surrounded by nothing but water, the artist standing inside the thickets of gotjawal is wrapped inside it. What he is doing, in other words, is not reproducing a specific subject but depicting through his brush the atmosphere of the thickets, of which he himself is a part.
In these landscape paintings, the artist exists “inside” the thickets. The thickets allow the artist and the viewers of his work to stand only “inside” them. Compared with Lee’s previous work, it can be seen as progress that the artist now stands inside and amidst his subject. The artist, who had been touching and scratching the flesh of his subjects with his brush and needle, has now stepped inside his subject. Being inside something, however, also means that one is captured by it. Lee seems captured by the atmosphere of the thickets depicted on his large canvases. This effect is maximized in his paintings of night scenes of the thickets, for darkness amplifies the impermeability of these thick forests, which are difficult for one to walk through in the first place. The viewer, surrounded by the paintings, will feel as if he were in captivity amidst the thickets. This sense of captivity seems related to the intense feeling of being lost and helpless, which Lee was overcome with in the process of painting these landscapes. But he was able to find his way out in a spectacular manner: Instead of trying to escape the thickets, he decided to remain inside of them, indulging in his tactile desires and fulfilling them by painting the thickets.
Lee Kwang Ho has said that one day he would like to paint without seeing, that he would like to paint purely from the tactile sensation felt through touch. Tactility is a far more direct sensory experience than seeing with one’s eyes. If we were to say that seeing is a safer experience, one in which a certain distance can be maintained from the subject, touching requires direct bodily contact, entailing more risk—of the danger of the subject incurring harm on my body, of my body contracting something from the subject, of something unpleasant staining my body. This is why the person attempting to encounter the world through the sense of touch must have trust in the world. He must, in other words, overcome the fundamental foreignness that exists between his body and the corporeal world. Lee Kwang Ho’s art has been a process of overcoming this foreignness to enable a tactile encounter with the world, by touching and feeling the subject through his gaze, then, with his hands, reproducing, exercising, and fulfilling, the tactile sensation that is remembered in his eyes.

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Excerpted from the essay, A Tactile Encounter with the World, written by Kim Namsee, Professor of College of Art and Design at Ewha Womans University, Exhibition catalog Painting Landscape, Kukje Gallery, 2014.

 

 

 

LEE KwangHo
Born in 1967, Seoul, Korea

EDUCATION
1999 M.F.A in Printmaking, Department of Fine Arts, Graduate School, Seoul National University, Korea
1994 B.F.A in Painting, College of Fine Arts, Seoul National University, Korea

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITION
2014 Picturing Landscape, Kukje Gallery, Seoul, Korea
2012 Caress, Gallery SoSo, Paju, Korea
2011 Touch, Johyun Gallery, Busan, Korea
2010 Touch, Kukje Gallery, Seoul, Korea
2008 Lee Kwang-Ho, Daegu MBC Gallery M, Daegu, Korea
2006 Inter-View in Changdong, Changdong Art Studio, Seoul, Korea
2003 Paintings with Annotations, Hanjeon Plaza Gallery, Seoul, Korea
2002 The Spy, Gallery Indeco, Seoul, Korea
2001 Lee Kwang-Ho, Gallery Indeco, Seoul, Korea
1996 Lee Kwang-Ho, Gallery Boda, Seoul, Korea

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITION
2015 Illusion and Fantasy, Museum of Modern And Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea
2014 Picturing Landscape, Kukje Gallery, Seoul, Korea
2013 AMMA UMMA!, India International Centre, New Delhi, India
2012 Korean Eye, The Saatchi Gallery, London
2011 The Seoul Art Exhibition 2011, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul
2010 Defense Mechanism, TN Gallery, Beijing, China
2009 Prague Biennale, Prague, Czech
2008 Fifty- five Contemporary Artists, Seoul Arts Center, Seoul
2007 On Painting, Kukje gallery, Seoul
2006 International Painting Prize, Castellon, Spain