ART AND CULTER
http://www.artinculture.kr/content/view/638/29/
퇴락한 자연에서 끌어낸 환상과 희망
글｜이선영
천국과 지옥을 넘나드는 자연의 양면성
이연미의 ‘불타는 정원’에 등장하는 기이한 도상과 사건들은 파스텔 톤으로 연하게 흐려져 있지만, 맞부딪히는 생경함의 강도는 줄어들지 않는다. 뒤에 햇살이 비치는 폐쇄된 공간은 순수의 결정체들이 감추어져 있는 미지의 대륙으로 보인다. 사나워 보이는 통통한 새가 그 앞을 지키고 있는데, 이 새들은 그들만의 천국인 서식지가 인간에 의해 오염되어 멸종되었다는 전설의 새이다. 여기에서 인간들은 그 자체가 순수를 침해하는 불순한 것으로 다가온다. 공조와 상생보다는 경쟁과 침해가 압도적인 인간의 삶은 온통 원죄로 물들어 있는 것이다. 인간들은 나무에 갇혀 있고 도도새는 불을 뿜는다. 불꽃이 낙엽처럼 흩날리는 정원에 냉랭한 한기를 쏟아내는 것은 거대한 푸른 뱀이다. 악의 화신인 뱀은 사악한 미소를 짓고 판을 들쑤시고 다니며, 갈대밭을 쑥대밭으로 만든다. 이연미의 작품 속 식물들은 아픔과 죽음의 공포를 느끼는 동물성을 지니고 있다. 그 동물성의 식물들은 다리를 뻗어 여기저기로 이동한다.
반면 인간을 비롯한 동물들은 나무 열매나 꽃같이 정박되어 있는 식물성을 띤다. 그것들은 하나의 씨앗에서 나온 식물처럼 모두 닮은 꼴이며, 그저 물이나 양분이 통과하는 도관처럼 보인다. 여러 작품에 분산되어 나타나는 도상들이 모두 집결해 상호작용하는 대작 < The garden inferno >는 고통의 장소를 알레고리로 표현한다. 단테의 지옥 편을 떠오르게 하는 이 장면은 ‘불’과 ‘물’이라는 대조되는 상징이 뒤엉켜 있다. 이연미의 정원은 자연스러운 것이라고는 하나도 없는 반(反)자연적인 것들로 채워져 있다. 이연미의 정원에서 일어나는 것은 자연으로부터의 도약이거나 전락이다. 중성적이고 수동적인 자연과 현실을 극적인 것으로 변형시키는 것은 공상과 상상이다. 자연의 법칙과 삶의 규칙으로부터 일탈하는 향연은 매끄럽고 능숙한 표현 방식을 빌어서 이 닫힌 정원을 히스테릭하고 매너리즘적인 인공 낙원으로 변모시킨다.
자연, 특히 정원은 여성으로 간주되었다. 원초적 자연은 문명에 의해 상처 받은 삶을 회귀시키는 천국으로 간주되지만, 그것은 동시에 죽음의 냄새를 풍긴다. 천국과 지옥을 넘나드는 자연은 여성에게 부과된 양면성과 중첩된다. 자연과 여성에 대해 양면성을 투사했던 최초의 근대적 예술가로 보들레르를 꼽곤 한다. 보들레르 역시 인공 낙원에 심취했던 예술가이다. 온통 원죄로 물들어 있는 자연과 여성은 매혹의 대상이자, 인간을 파멸로 이끌 수 있는 이중적인 본성을 가진다.
전락과 도약을 오고 가는 이연미의 자연 역시 평범한 시민적 또는 대중적 삶에 권태를 느끼며, 자신의 상상력을 매개로 심연과 무한에 심취하게 하는 신비한 수단이다. 근대는 이성에 의해 도구화된 자연을 무기력한 물질 덩어리이면서도 원초적인 생명력을 가지고 있는 미지의 대륙으로 변화시켰다. 저주받은 물질과 순수의 결정체라는 두 개념의 자연이 모더니즘에 스며든다. 이연미의 작품은 정보 혁명 속에서 양적 질적으로 확산되는 매개체를 통해 모더니즘이 대중화되면서 하위 문화를 형성하였고, 이 하위 문화의 세례를 받은 젊은 상상력들이 다시 예술과 조우하고 있다는 것을 보여준다.
IVORY YEUNMI LEE
Ivory Yeunmi Lee, "Frogmen in the Garden Inferno"
June 2 - July 7, 2012 at PYO Gallery, Downtown
by Scarlet Cheng
Wandering the imaginary landscapes of the paintings of Ivory Yeunmi Lee is like floating through an eerie, pastel-hued reverie – a summer afternoon nap, perhaps, when we find ourselves following a cloaked rabbit down the hole. We’ve dozed off and entered a world of strange creatures and plants that are amalgams of what we’ve seen or heard about, with a Jungian connection we’ve made to them. In these reveries humanoids, plants and animals inhabit otherworldly gardens – they’re bits of heaven and bits of hell, although it must be said that the heavenly parts are not so ideal, and the hellish parts are not so horrible. That is because Lee’s vision has elements of the dangerous or discomforting mixed with elements of the adorable and the humorous. The soft tones of pinks and blues and greens, and the meticulous renderings pull us in.
I don’t say “hellish” lightly – Lee herself places the word “inferno” into the titles of many of her works, which are drawn in colored pencil and painted in acrylic. In “The Garden Inferno” two pinkish ducks are immersed in an aquamarine-blue pond. We see only their heads and the upper part of their shoulders and wings. At first they appear to be nothing more than cute illustrations from a children’s book, but then we realize how they peer out of slitted eyes and each breathes out a little flame of fire. They’re hatching some no-good scheme, no doubt. In fact, these little flames are all over the landscape – floating through the air like leaves, burning atop the trees. These trees are carefully pruned, each is a vertical of four bundles with evenly positioned leaves.
Lee is into trees, their forms and their allusions – the Tree of Life, the Tree of Knowledge, the World Tree. “The Fruittree” is a kind of World Tree, positioned as it is upon its own island, its branches sporting both bundles of leaves and individual leaves. More surprisingly, this tree is standing on its own two feet! Meanwhile, the edge of the island is rimmed by panels of eyes, just a portion of the face with eyes and cheeks, looking out like sentinels.
In “Frogmen in the Garden Inferno” human heads are embedded in big leafy trees. From their mouths issue a stream of water – as in some fountain – into a lake (also a pale aquamarine blue). This lake is filled with the panels of eyes peering out similar to those in "The Fruit tree." There’s an impassivity in the faces and creations in Lee’s work; they are neither happy nor sad, but passing their ordinary hours doing things which seem just a bit extraordinary.
Several paintings have a decidedly goth sensibility, whispering of death, decay, and a certain decadence. Especially ghoulish is “The Blue Blood” in which a blue snake winds in and out of a floating disk, dark liquid dripping from its body. This snake sports a toothy smile (small, sharp teeth), as its forked tongue tests the air. “The Garden with Olive” shows just a human head, perhaps a severed one, with a burning helmet on. Black liquid (blood or sap?) seeps from under the helmet and down the side of his face and neck. His counterpart appears to be the female head in “The Fountain in the Reddish Garden.” This head wears a cap made of reddish petals, and likewise the black liquid streams down her cheeks and neck. She also issues a stream of water flowing from her lips.
The artist sees painting as her way of connecting reality and imagination, and an exploration of her musings. There’s much sly humor in her work – her depictions of knowing animals and brainless humanoids are very clever, funny and jarring, and then there’s the charm.
http://www.visualartsource.com/index.php?page=editorial&pcID=36&aID=1259
Dreaming of the garden of Eden in an Artificial Garden
What kind of garden to people dream of? To the Korean people, the word itself usually defines the a plot of land which surrounds the house we live in. However, urban gardens in Korea have become simple and standardized as social civilizations have rapidly evolved to bring us new gardening cultures through indoor greenhouse gardening in apartment-type house. This evolutionary trend started in the 80s through the 90s which continues to morph into the present day. Especially in the 90s the internet boom and availability of the internet's virtual space has brought a "Matrix" affect to imaginary space. The reality is that through this space, people are enabled to modify and change space around to tailor to their Artificial 'Net Garden.' On the other hand, the shift into virtual reality is causing them to experience claustrophobia by making us prisoners of a selfish civilization that we create and engineer. We are living in a closed culture where all systems are concentrated as one and through this concentration we are being watched and controlled.
Artificial gardens are created to suit individual preferences. We can grow plants, raise pets, watch television, browse the Web, read books, and even dine in our gardens. This place has become a resting area where we chat with our family and neighbors. Recipient of this modern technology are naturally leading their lives in this virtual space. This Artificial garden has become an essential part of our lives where we rest and interact to relive the realities of our busy lives.
For Yeunmi Lee, this place has possibly become the primary places to spread her imaginations.
Yeunmi Lee had a dream of become an artist she was a kindergartner. She had the attributes of being introspective, reserved and had a calm personality. Her closed and reserved personality kept her away from outdoor activities and groomed her self-awareness through this 'artificial garden.' The indoor Yeunmi had almost no experience in the external world but became more interested in Japanese Manga that was made popular in South Korea in the early 1990s when she was a late teenager. Her fantasy was directed in the worlds of Japanese Manga. Since then, her enthusiasm to become an Artist helped her to enter the College of Fine Arts at Kookmin University majoring in Fine Arts and continued her fantasies through Graduate School.
Yeunmi Lee's days are filled with imaginations and fantasies. Her imaginations and fantasies gave birth to her first Solo exhibition work at the Da Vinci Gallery in 2005 with the theme of a 'Fantastic Nature'. Ironically, she later realizes her work is related to messages of the Bible. Since then, she works with the Bible as her source of motif. Out of such inspirations were born she later created works in 'The Closed Garden''The Garden Inferno' exhibited in 2008 through 2009.'The Garden Inferno' greatly inspired by phrase from the first chapter of Isaiah (Isaiah Chapter 1, 29-31)
Her creative works surprise me for I emphasizes the importance of 'intuitive perceptions on objects' on 'how to see and appreciate all the things of the world' to the students at the College of Fine Arts. Is it really possible to create such works merely with fantasies out of cartoons without looking at the external worlds outside the frames of fine arts? Wouldn't there be limits to it... I believe that the Japanese Manga was a tool that gave her the power of intuition as a person who experienced the cultural phenomena of the 1990s.
I can only imagine that she creates her own gardens through the tradeoffs between "Imaginations - Visions" and "Virtual - Reality" which resonates her religious devotions that arrive from her Artificial Garden and Manga. Through her religious devotions she composes and expresses various fantasies of man's psychological longing and desire of the Garden of Eden before the corruption of mankind. (Y.Lee, Dissertation, P19). Such fantasies express her unfamiliar and unappealing imaginations. She moves through the 'In-Between Space' struggling in the incomplete and imperfect issues of reality and virtual reality. This virtual reality exists beyond the yonder by dreaming various objects such as the openings of walls and earth, trees in the garden, bleeding faces that are locked in the feathers of large winged animals, trees have engulfed people, reeds are torn under fire and bleed etc. This expresses the Artist's struggle and resistance of a systematically closed world and on the other hand expresses man's longing of a paradise we once lost.
Is that why she works so hard to make use of unfamiliar and strange animals, plants, and even water to create a perfect garden? Even that may have not been enough for her that she had to made fire at the recent work of 'The Garden Inferno'. The bleeding people locked there in the work are her selves multiplied out of her own genes. The Garden of Eden created out of her fantasies are full of blood and fire to warn people of the secular world of sinister omens rather than of peace.
This is nothing new, but films these days are filled with messages that foreshadow the coming of the end of the world. Furthermore, criminal and thriller films have reached the boundary to leap beyond the human attributes. Nobody can be fully sure of the ultimate destinations, but her works such as 'The Closed Garden' and 'The Garden Inferno' are on the extension line with such films.
The world artist Yeunmi Lee met is not a world we can find anywhere in this world. She has established the key words such as 'imagination, reality, nature, garden, the Garden of Eden, tree, perfection, imperfection, sacrifice, blood, water, unfamiliarity, animal, plant, creation, truth, symbol, humor, hybrid animal, seduction, grotesqueness, God, Christ, existence, nonexistence, good, evil, place to escape to' to open the intangible world. Wouldn't it be possible to see and understand the world beyond the works by opening and entering the many rooms? Perhaps opening each room through the imaginations of the Net space using each keyword to disentangling the secrets could possibly be a pleasurable journey.
To get back to the aforementioned artificial gardens, the motif brings us both limits and possibilities of creativity of the Korean fine arts world. Previous generation artists including myself resent the loss of culture and changes, but the attributes of the new generation fuse cultures by being attracted to the norms of another society and get assimilated to that culture to create the optimal outcome. We think the older generation think they are closed, but they hardly think so. She helps us to understand more and more that everyone has one's own way of dreaming the world. Once again we realize that the present may lack the way of the analogue world but new generations of young people may take an analogue approach in their own culture codes without needing us to impose our thoughts on their boundaries of their imaginary world.
Kwan-Hoon, Lee (Curator, Project Space Sarubia)