RAG's Asian Heritage Month
Richmond, Canada, 2004
After passing through the noisy crowds in the adjacent concourse, it's otherworldly to walk into the hushed and darkened realm of the Richmond Art Gallery. There, galaxies of glowing objects float in space and a low, steady pulse of sound emanates from an unseen corner of the exhibition rooms.
Most of her forms are composed of fluorescent threads pressed between layers of transparent polyester film. From a small distance, only the threads are visible, evoking networks of nerve fibres or blood vessels or fine, organic glyphs. But the luminous pink, orange, green, and violet strands also articulate the larger polyester forms, the pillows, tubes, and columns within which they're embedded. Lee, as the RAG's exhibition pamphlet points out, is sculpting with light.
The most successful installations here employ embryonic and umbilical forms to create metaphors of conception and incubation. (Paradoxically, they also evoke death, the other end of the continuum.) Lost Embryo, comprising some 3,000 small, squiggly, tubular forms mounted on the wall in 14 long, horizontal rows or clustered in two large, disordered rectangles, suggests thronging life at a subcellular level. Again, however, the individual forms are as reminiscent of written language--a kind of fantastical calligraphy--as they are of biology. Just as life is encoded in genetic material, the artist seems to say, memory is written under the skin, within the body.
Lee grapples, bravely and unfashionably, with the great existential mysteries: life, death, consciousness, and the vast starry night of the universe.
Source: http://www.straight.com/article/eunsook-lee
Most of her forms are composed of fluorescent threads pressed between layers of transparent polyester film. From a small distance, only the threads are visible, evoking networks of nerve fibres or blood vessels or fine, organic glyphs. But the luminous pink, orange, green, and violet strands also articulate the larger polyester forms, the pillows, tubes, and columns within which they're embedded. Lee, as the RAG's exhibition pamphlet points out, is sculpting with light.
The most successful installations here employ embryonic and umbilical forms to create metaphors of conception and incubation. (Paradoxically, they also evoke death, the other end of the continuum.) Lost Embryo, comprising some 3,000 small, squiggly, tubular forms mounted on the wall in 14 long, horizontal rows or clustered in two large, disordered rectangles, suggests thronging life at a subcellular level. Again, however, the individual forms are as reminiscent of written language--a kind of fantastical calligraphy--as they are of biology. Just as life is encoded in genetic material, the artist seems to say, memory is written under the skin, within the body.
Lee grapples, bravely and unfashionably, with the great existential mysteries: life, death, consciousness, and the vast starry night of the universe.
Source: http://www.straight.com/article/eunsook-lee