Yoon Lee, …the end of the world
January 25 – February 23, 2019
Opening Reception
Friday, January 25 | 6-8 pm
Location
the luggage store | 1007 Market St. (@6th) SF, CA 94103
Gallery Hours
Wednesday – Saturday | 12-5 pm and by appointment
Artist Talk
Saturday, February 2 | 2-3 pm
In ¦the end of the world, Lee states:
œOur brains are resilient. The neural networks within us repair and rearrange themselves to persist and survive against trauma. The constant cacophony of abuse, injustice, intolerance, etc. “ even the daily reminder of human capacity for unimaginable cruelty and greed can be dealt with.
Things are not black and white. Intrigue and beauty can be found in the shades of gray in between if you can deal with the relative and relational nature of everything.
Impressions of fear (of falling, in particular), confusion, perseverance, persistence, survival, and letting go are some of the things I took from Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. It gave me the mental tools to reconfigure my neural network and helped me to get through the recent dark times.
Lee develops her compositions by bringing together elements as diverse as images that she™s compiled from popular media, her own sketches, and photographs she™s taken of man-made structures. She scans all of these elements into the computer and uses various filtering mechanisms to manipulate the forms and capture the sense of motion in them. Whereas futurists attempted to capture the physical sensation of motion and speed of the newly invented automobiles and airplanes, Lee attempts to convey the sense of chaotic activity, intensity, and speed of contemporary life”not only in the physical world but also as experienced in the digital realm. She notes”
œThe allure of synthetic materiality in my work is close to that of confectionaries and shiny plastic items that have inundated our culture. This connection between the work and consumer goods reflects my interest in consumption as a strategy to assuage urban anxiety. My work addresses the relationship between this anxiety and the speed in which information and signals travel through space. The convergence reflects my vision of contemporary reality”complex and fraught with chaotic activity and information overflow; often invisible yet bounded by a sense of physical order. (Lee, 2009)
To achieve this Lee has conceived a unique way of painting which combines technology and meticulous handwork”both elements being integral to her paintings. Her use of digital technology has allowed her to bring a sense of speed and facility to the paintings and yet her actual painting process is slow and meticulous. From a distance her paintings appear spontaneous and perhaps even mechanically produced but, upon closer inspection, the labor-intensive process she employs to make them is evident in the textured layers of paint. Her paintings bring to mind a kinetic combination of Pollock, Lichtenstein and Al Heald”dithered dot matrices and swirls depicting deep space-like environments.
Her paintings incorporate sweeping motion often set against, and moving through, more static architectural and urban forms such as highway-like structures, bridges, among others.
Yoon Lee was born in Busan, Korea and grew up mainly in Southern California. Yoon received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2016, She was commissioned to do a huge permanent installation at One Market Plaza in SF. She is a recipient of the Eureka Fellowship through the Fleishhacker Foundation and a Pollock Krasner Foundation award, as well as residencies in Florida, LA and in CA. She has had solo shows in New York and CA and has shown in Spain and Germany.
Note: In conjunction with the exhibition, visitors are invited to participate by submitting on a white 8 x 10 sheet of paper, writing which either begins with œ¦the end of the world or ends with œ¦the end of the world.
(no hate speech will be posted)