Fantasy Tree (2012)

[아트타임즈=편집정리 김선곤선임기자]

 ‘자연의 생명에 열광한 화가 … 자연의 얼굴들을 그리다’

서영희 (홍익대학교 미술대학 교수, 평론가)

미국 뉴욕의 중견화가인 이승 교수(롱아일랜드 대학)의 개인전이 12월 12일(목)부터 30일(월)까지 맨하탄 첼시의 킵스 갤러리에서 열린다. 이승 작가는 그 동안 자연을 소재로 한 다양한 형상의 회화와 드로잉 작품들을 발표해왔으며, 수 년 전부터는 미디어와 설치 작업에도 관심을 보이면서 표현 영역을 넓혀왔다.

그의 작품세계는 동양과 서양의 경계를 넘나들며 형성되었고, 동양적 감성과 서양 매체의 조우는 늘 흥미로운 조형적 결과를 낳았다.

특히 이번 킵스갤러리 전시에서 그는 나무, 별똥, 잠자리 등 자연에서 발견한 신선한 생명의 약동을 환상적인 형상들로 조형화한 작품들을 선보이고 있다. 전시작의 화면 위에서 때로는 역동적인 나무의 꿈틀거림이 느껴지고 커다란 잠자리의 날개짓이 불러일으키는 바람결이 우리 마음자락을 들썩이기도 한다.

작가 개인의 고유한 시선과 내면의 정서를 읽어낼 수 있는 작품들 앞에서 관객들은 오래간만에 자연의 무한한 신비와 생명력을 만나볼 수 있을 것이다. 레디메이드와 시뮬라크르로 가득 찬 현대 도시문명의 한 켠에서 자연의 순수하고도 환상적인 이미지들을 마주할 수 있다는 것은 우리로서는 드문 행운의 만남이며 그래서 감동의 순간이 되리라고 여겨진다.

볼티모어의 MICA(Maryland Institute College of Art)에서 드로잉을 전공하고, 뉴욕의 프랫인스티튜트 대학원에서 회화를 전공한 화가의 흥미로운 작품 이력을 그의 홈페이지에서 만나보는 것도 좋은 감상의 지름길이 될 것이다. ⇨ www.leeseung.com

“Seung Lee_  An Ardent Nature”

essay by Jonathan Goodman

Seung Lee is a hybrid of two cultures; born and raised in Korea, he also has lived for many years in the United States, particularly in the New York City area, where he maintains a studio and teaches art at Long Island University. It can also be said that Lee is a hybrid artist, melding the double environments he has had experience with, in ways that enhance and complicate (in a good way) his esthetic. Certainly, his art is given to the portrayal of nature; his complex, beautiful compositions include fantasy trees, falling stars, yellow jacket bees, and dragonflies. Often incorporated into an abstract environment, Lee’s imagery is strikingly accurate from a scientific point of view. Such attention to detail enables the artist to work out, ironically enough, a fantasy of nature that includes a view of the creatures as predators, as well as abstract backgrounds that push the work toward subtle and brilliant studies of patterning. As a result, we cannot say that Lee is a figurative artist only; rather, he is a technically gifted artist who embraces nonobjective and figurative art in the pursuit of a new vision of natural life. A sense of struggle obtains in Lee’s art; the meeting of styles also can signifyconfrontation or fighting, perhaps with the goal of conflict resolution andultimately balance.

 

We can develop the evidence for our thesis from the pictures themselves. In Fantasy Tree (2012), we see a twisted, arcing trunk with branches outlined in white; leaf forms and what look like magnified cells add visual interest to the central image of a tree turning this way and that. The trunk and branches themselves are transparent, revealing an abstract layer underneath. Although the treatment of the tree is quite beautiful, it is also part of a gestalt that communicates threat—the environment serves as a field in which cultural as well as natural dichotomies are worked out.

The same sense of darkness is seen in Dragonfly (2013), a nearly hyperrealistic study of the insect with a black body and transparent, silver wings. The background of the image consists of a transparent, silver circle with white scratch marks, around which is a brown frame showing off black splotches. The dragonfly is depicted as a formidable creature. Larger than life, the artist’s rendition demonstrates an impressive body and wings, which look generally ominous to his audience.

These works are anchored by Lee’s strong sense of line, which in turn emphasizes detail of some untoward aura. In this sense, his paintings can be impressively aggressive,with uncontained threat. Yet the menace can be read as part of an innate dichotomy between cultural difference and even difference in the artist’s materials; in other words, aggression and vulnerability, death and rebirth,common to us all, are reborn in Lee’s work.

But we should remember that Lee does not only offer a realistic interpretation of nature; he also includes abstraction of a fanciful kind. Lovefight  (2013) includes two bees, one in black and yellow stripes and the other in black and green stripes, closely circling each other in a dance suggesting eroticism and death at the same time. The ground is gray with broken lines encircling the two insects; a light-gray background with splotches of darker gray demonstrate how Lee can render abstraction as a support of the bees, which are painted so that they are nearly abstract themselves. Again, we come across dualities, which the artist has commented as proceeding from a bi-cultural fabric of experience.Falling Stars  (2013) show Lee’s audience nature as a category of lyric beauty. At the top of the painting, we see stars of several colors—red, purple, and blue among them—drip color from their points down the thick trunk of a tree detailed in white. The drips almost reach the bottom of the canvas, bringing interest to the lower spaces, which are complicated by imagery that looks like foliage or underbrush. It is a very beautiful painting, made more so by thepresence of the imagery imagined rather than drawn from life.

Lee will eventually be seen as a painter of acute imagination—someone willing to experiment with and elaborate his sinuous, exacting art. It is important toremember at the same time that his dualisms are not imaginary but real, in the sense that they carry forward a view of very different influences resultingfrom the two countries where he has lived. The dualities cannot be reconciled, although they can be juxtaposed in the imagination—the conflict is actual, accounting for the works’ implicit aggression, and will not go away.

전시 일정

2013년 12월 12일(목)~30일(월)

킵스갤러리, 맨하튼 첼시 (511 West 25th Street, NYC, NY.)

오프닝 리셉션 : 12월 12일(목) 오후 6시~8시.

작가소개.

이승 작가는 수 십년 동안 뉴욕주에 거주하면서 매우 활발한 창작활동을 하는 대표적인 재미작가이며, Long Island University 대학원에서 회화를 강의하는 교수이자 현재 LIU 미술대학원의 학장이기도 하다.

중국과 한국 등 아시아지역과 유럽에서의 초대전, 개인전, 단체전 등 전시를 자주 하고 있으며, 특히 지난 2011년 한국미술협회로부터 “최고의 국제 한인작가상”을 수상하였다. 2012년 여름에는 서울에서 개인전을 가진 한편 강릉의 작가레지던시에 초대되어 작품제작을 했다.

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