3 Apr 2009 — 2 May 2009

 Sojung Lee's page
Sojung Lee
Unfamiliar Holiday

Sojung Lee is an artist known for organic abstraction with Korean traditional technique of Oriental painting. Sojung Lee uniquely unraveled ‘decisive jot’, the characteristic of Korean ink painting, with the automatic drawing form. The artist, who has put personal narration of self confession into organic composition of circle forms signifying female womb, scissors, and thin lines recalling human body in early works, developed the pictorial expression with clear picture composition and accidental effect like paint dripping in 'The coward in snowfield' shown at Kumho Museum in 2007. The artist took the structural form of expanding from surface in the new work Unfamiliar Holiday; taking a step forward from personal narration to the story of social self.
The story of ‘Unfamiliar Holiday’ initiated in the process of associating images of uncomfortable harmony, given by the livelihood of repeating risky bets between familiar common idea (manual) and individual’s personal manual by people of different natures and situations. More deepened working style of Sojung Lee is shown through Unfamiliar Holiday. If the artist understood image as line in the previous series of , the composition of surface is striking in the works of ‘Unfamiliar Holiday’. If the method of spontaneously developing from one dot was used in the previous works, the recent series follows the method of laying images like pasting flesh to skeleton, which has the pause sign as its body and the play sign as its head. In ‘Unfamiliar Holiday’, the commonly used manual signs are interpreted as surfaces themselves and with them as the bony frame, images were unraveled.
There are many simple basic signs in the work of Sojung Lee. It is not hard to find out that these are simple directions for machines easily found around our surroundings. The signs in the work Unfamiliar Holiday are the simple signs from BOSCH electric drill manual book -operate, arrow, pause, caution, rotation direction-; new imageries were constructed with these as the bony frame. These images continue to derive new images by expanding, disappearing, or reiterating. Through such process, Sojung Lee said she felt pleasure among the multiplying images but felt very strange simultaneously with the process of connecting image with image. In the end, image infinitely proliferates itself through the hand of artist and it is hard to figure out who the subject is.
The machine called electric drill we know is a tool that assembles and disassembles small and big structures with easy tightening and loosening, to connect object to object with screws. Looking into the image of her work, one finds that the image itself is functioning like a drill. It becomes the joint between atypical images here and there, and plays the role of rupturing this image and that image as if to assume the unit of image.
Through this ‘Unfamiliar Holiday’ series, Sojung Lee tried to express the two different, reposed and isolated sides of the generally and customarily presented social manual which are sometimes taken rightfully, and sometimes strangely. The artist strives to create completely automatically-generated images, in order to form visual sympathy with viewers. 
Dazzling Age
Ink on rice paper
130 x 162 cm
2008