ESSAY
Hyunmee Lee's Touch:
Meditation Joins Gesture
By Courtney Davis (2008)
The gestural paintings of Hyunmee Lee are sumptuously minimal. Rich forms advance from buttery canvases like an abstract garden. Gauzy veils of paint hover like soft air against the ebony weight of matter. Light peeks through translucent shapes like sunlight illuminating soft mist. Texture swirls and echoes across the canvas as if carved by waves or eroded by the wind. The viewer, invited into a realm of contemplation and meditation, is surprised to look away and see the physical world existing in only three dimensions. But perhaps that is precisely the experience the artist would like the viewer to have.
In her current exhibition, Touch, on display at the Phillips Gallery in Salt Lake City, Utah, Lee focuses on the power of the shape, asserting the desire for her work to become “more simple and bold” as “inspired by a concept of 'freedom' from the world” and from the artist"s own mind. This freedom takes the form of striking, dominant shapes not seen in Lee's previous works. Rather than focus on the subtle interplay of soft, diaphanous forms, Lee explores the impact of confident, abstract shapes nearly geometric in form. The rectilinear ebony shapes in Inland Crossing No.4 and Seraphic Stone No.37 ground the dimensional layers of abstract space, just as Dimensional Poetics #1 and Seraphic Stone No.36 incorporate a strong pictorial, almost graphic, quality that differs from the artist's previous works.
Although Touch reveals a bolder side to Lee, the Korean-born artist has not divorced herself from her eastern roots. Quite the contrary, the exhibit confirms that the harmonious marriage of western abstraction and eastern sensibility is still thriving in Lee's works.
Touch highlights Lee's personal and physical relationship with her work, which is alive with her signature meditative gesture. But Lee's large, squared canvases do not simply record the artist's gestures in abstract expressionist fashion. Working with brushes and palette knives on carefully prepared ground, Lee interacts with her materials. Paint is applied in layers, as washes or opaque blocks. Expressive lines are formed with china markers, oil sticks and oil pencils.
Lee's work embraces the unity of opposites. Influenced by Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism, Lee balances the spontaneity of intuitive painterly impulses with the resolution of deliberate forms and shapes. Just as her own life merges East and West, the artist seeks to accommodate opposing energies in her work: the meditative process, which is slow, deliberate, and akin to repetition, and gesture, which is spontaneous and quick. Although her process is far from being impulsive or unpremeditated, Lee admits that sometimes nature bestows gifts, wherein the spontaneous gesture is complete in itself. Other times, however, the process is much more demanding, requiring hours of deliberation and contemplation. It is this balance between spontaneity and restraint, gesture and meditation that forms the heart of Lee's work.
Heightening the interplay of opposition, many works featured in Touch juxtapose soft, tender yellow against an otherwise monochromatic palette. Strong ebony shapes highlight the influence of eastern calligraphy, as well as the artist's interest in the eastern concepts of emptiness and nothingness. Thus, rather than representing death or pessimism, Lee's use of black is more about the presence of light than its absence. Far from being steeped in negativity or pessimism, Lee uses black to open a dimension outside of the physical world, a place of meditation where judgment is suspended so that the viewer can move to a realm of advancement. In this respect, Lee's works function as verbs—invitations to a space of meditation created by the supreme balance of opposition.
Indeed, the eastern philosophical underpinnings of Lee's works separate her from a classic western expressionist. Lee's individualistic technique of uniting meditation and gesture echoes the ancient principles of Tao:
To yield is to be preserved whole. To be bent is to become straight. To be empty is to be full. To be worn out is to be renewed. To have little it to possess. To have plenty is to be perplexed.
(Courtney Davis is an art historian, lecturer, and attorney.)