Media artist Lee Lee-nam, who draws on traditional Korean ink painting as the foundation of his practice, is staging a solo exhibition centered on microorganisms. The show, titled "Sieo Muhyeong Cheongeomoseong (Seeing in the Formless, Hearing in the Soundless): Painterly Reflections on Life and Existence," opens this week at Hakgojae Gallery in Seoul.
Hakgojae announced Wednesday that the exhibition runs through Saturday. The show marks a step beyond Lee's long-running "image transformation" series, shifting his gaze from the moment an image takes shape to the movement and life that precede it.
The exhibition title is drawn from an ancient maxim: "See in what is invisible; hear in what is silent."
The show begins from the premise that invisibility does not equal absence. Countless forms of life and matter are ceaselessly born and extinguished at points beyond the reach of human perception. Lee collected water directly from Yongso Falls and examined it under a microscope, entering a microscopic realm the naked eye could never access. The waterway flowing from Yongso Falls into the Yeongsan River serves both as a starting point for contemplating the origins of life and as a place where the artist traces his own roots. Following the traces of tiny organisms born, moving and vanishing within a single drop of water, the work poses questions about where life originates and where it goes. The forms, movements and trail of lines drawn by clusters of magnified organisms evoke the ridgelines of mountain ranges — at times flowing gracefully, at others dispersing like clouds and mist. The deeper one looks into these familiar surfaces, the more a different texture of cells and particles slowly reveals itself. This process also transforms the way Lee interprets "sansu," or landscape, the concept that has long anchored his practice.
The word "formless" in the exhibition title speaks directly to this idea — a state before something has fixed itself into a single shape, a fluid and transitional moment. "Soundless," too, does not mean complete silence. Waves continue beyond the threshold of human hearing; a phenomenon does not cease to exist simply because it cannot be sensed. The fact that something lies beyond the reach of eye and ear challenges the assumption that reality can only be defined within the bounds of what humans are able to perceive.
For Lee, the act of "seeing in the invisible and hearing in the silent" means stepping outside the familiar boundaries of the senses — an effort to bring into view even those forms of existence that had gone unnoticed.
tiger@heraldcorp.com
