Soyoon LEE

“Each of us is locked inside our own peculiar vision. … When we open our eyes, we enter into an illusory world, a scene broken apart by the retina and re-created by the cortex. Just as a painter interprets a picture, we interpret our sensations.”(<Proust was a neuroscientist>)

In life, we make interpretations. Our brains interpret the information transmitted from our senses. As a result, sensation is always interpretation. I have made works by questioning our acts of sensation and cognition and with a focus on turning into images the subjective and abstract impressions and reactions that are created by our acts of interpretation.
 
I make objects by combining or deconstructing materials such as fabrics, old objects found at second-hand markets, and paintings, and develop them into spatial collages. The shape of object works is incidentally formed in the process of arbitrarily trimming and polishing the materials collected. These shapes are abstracted and completed by blurring (hiding) or further revealing (representing) the materiality of each material. Blurring and revealing is the application of the dual nature unique to language of ‘hiding and representing the truth’ to non-verbal objects by using material expressive techniques. Once stories have been removed from them, the objects completed can be filled with any story.

My interest in acts of sensation has extended from the past works, where I worked with the theme of inevitable errors in linguistic translation. Even under the optimal conditions, both verbal and non-verbal communication is still completed in an imperfect state. This is because we each are subjective and others’ interpretations therefore are always abstract. I have thus made works exploring how abstract to others the standards of readability inherent in an individual’s acts of perception and cognition are and how subjectively such abstract images, in turn, are sensed.

Soyoon LEE
Born in 1987, Seoul, Korea

EDUCATION
2015 M.F.A. Fine Arts, Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom
2010 B.F.A. Fine Arts, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2016 Alternative Space LOOP, Seoul, Korea

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2015 RCA Secret, Dyson Gallery, London, United Kingdom
2014 RCA Secret, Dyson Gallery, London, United Kingdom
2014 School of Fine Art Work-in-Progress Show, The Kensington Galleries, London, United Kingdom
2012 Symbiosis, Gallery Aile, Seoul, Korea
2012 Under Construction, Fox3 Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
2012 Great White, Gallery 500, Baltimore, Maryland, USA