이상원

Lee Juyeon’s Landscape Beyond Visibility: An Abstract Device for the Mind-Scape

​                                Lee Junhee | Adjunct Professor, Department of Contemporary Art, Konkuk University

 Lee Juyeon’s works appear artificial in part because of their extensive use of straight lines. For this reason, they also feel architectural and urban. More specifically, they are close to Mondrian’s “cold abstraction” and to hard-edge painting, in which graphic elements are pronounced. The movement of straight lines cutting across the frame is bold, while the pictorial plane, divided by these lines, is simultaneously deconstructed, moving far beyond the conventional format of the rectangular canvas.

Lee states, “I explore how physical time, imbued with everyday scenery and the small moments of daily life, can be given form within a working space structured through geometric abstraction.” In this way, she articulates the kind of abstract painting she seeks to pursue.

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Lee Juyeon’s abstract painting may be understood as a “mind-scape,” in which nature is reconstructed through an urban sensibility. At the same time, however, her compositions can also evoke patterned images drawn from Korean traditional culture, such as the latticework of hanok doors and windows, rather than sculpture. The artist herself would likely not deny that a certain Korean sensibility is embedded in her work in metaphorical and condensed form, yet she would probably resist defining the work simply as “Korean.”

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“Compound structure,” “horizontal direction,” “angle of vision,” “hierarchical and differentiated zones,” “free space,” “the flow of space and its gradual transformation,” “passages between walls,” and “light, color, space, movement” … The vocabulary used by the artist consists of abstracted language and sensorial keywords associated with pure form. These terms encompass the encounter between East and West, the harmony of tradition and contemporaneity, the transition from figuration to abstraction, and the relationship between artist and artwork.

Lee Juyeon’s practice is like a matrix in which the past and the present—Actuality, Here & Now, Today—overlap.

Excerpted from Lee Junhee, “Lee Juyeon’s Landscape Beyond Visibility: An Abstract Device for the Mind-Scape”