Meditation

Meditation is important for exercising will power, and this is brain science, according to a psychologist or two, perhaps three, whom I saw on TV recently. It is particularly important in today’s world of heavy media distractions, at least one of them said, and the others may have nodded. Meditation, I’ve heard, is just thinking about one thing for more than just a few seconds and can be done with your eyes open, too. What if you are just spacing out for five minutes? Is that meditation, too? What is certain is that I also heard spacing out helps one store recently acquired information in their long-term memory.

What does meditation have to do with art? Well, meditation helps strengthen will power so it has something to do with getting anything done, including art. Energy helps productivity as well, but it would feel strange to see a blog post about food or exercise here. Yes, and that is why I decided to add this paragraph. Making art can be tougher than it seems, and the reason for the may or may not be obvious. So, in any case, making art can require meditation. Just a fun fact.

Four One-Person Exhibitions in 2022

I was fortunate enough to exhibit my art in four one-person exhibitions in 2022. Here is a link to my catalog for one of the exhibitions, the first one, at G&J Gallery in Seoul. The essay by the independent curator and terrific writer Mr. Min Byung Jic really captures what my art is about. My other exhibitions were at Kumho Gallery in Gwangju, Cheong-pa Gallery at Sookmyung Women’s University in Seoul, and Pyo Gallery, also in Seoul, in chronological order. Ms. Pyo Misun, the founder and director of Pyo Gallery, arranged for the Sookmyung Women’s University exhibition to happen. Pyo Gallery was founded in 1981. Those who visited or passed by the Pyo Gallery booth at Art Miami 2022 would have seen a couple of my paintings, too.

New Themes in My Art in 2021

In 2021, I have been making 130x162cm paintings, mostly of personified endangered animals and including messages regarding overcoming the climate crisis.

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Selected paintings done in 2021.

Myself Today, June 13, 2021

The days really go by. Yesterday or so, I happened upon an old, unpublished blog of mine from 2012, so nine years ago. It was a daily journal I kept for the first two months of the year, so before I entered Korea National University of Arts and started a new blog about my education there. Like when I went through other journal entries from 10 years ago, or when I reactivated a long deactivated social media account and review some posts from over a decade ago, I got to come closer to the fact that I only remember few daily details of my own past.

They say you don’t really know what you have until it is gone. So it is with your knowledge of what you did today, and even what you are up to more in general these days. So although a part of me does not believe I will ever be forgetting what I know about my life today, the aforementioned suggests I would find it neat one day if I wrote down what I am up to these days. Actually, it is not that. I am just writing this as a way of letting go of the fact I wish I had written more about my life in the past. It is just somehow easier to do it on a blog than in a more private way.

So on the weekend of June 12 and 13, I translated a document from Korean to English for the Cheongju Craft Biennale Organizing Committee. I would have had my reservations against publishing information like this before, out of fear of a potential competitor swooping in and intercepting any future translating work after reading my blog and identifying a prospective client. Today, I can tell myself I’d be rather quite impressed if the said competitor ever reads this post. For the record, I would be hard-pressed to find anyone who can translate, from Korean to English and vice-versa of course, more accurately than me. It is just that I just do not know how things work at the other end.

Other than translating, I am also participating in an artist residency, as mentioned in my previous post, and I am attending meetings on overcoming the climate crisis at the Gwangju Youth Center. I had listened to the audio book version of The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis earlier this year and am making 130x162cm paintings I hope will help spread the message of the authors. I am just making paintings I want to make for the pleasure of it, as in the pleasure of making the painting as well as of anticipating others’ viewing it, and adding written messages encouraging viewers to get more enthused about contributing to the overcoming of the climate crisis as well as sharing information about how to do the said contributing. Of course this latter part is a significant component of my aforementioned pleasure. I am looking forward to the aforementioned meetings leading to some practical action.

Below is an example of my recent work. There is more on my website, at www.hanlee.kr.

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Miro Center Residency

I was recently accepted to the Miro Center artist residency (I received the acceptance call on June 3rd). I will have access to a studio there from June 10 – Aug. 30 this summer. I am very excited by the nice and new facilities there. It is great to see such architectural, economic, and thus intellectual achievement, and to think I will be seeing it all the time! I plan to paint about achieving carbon neutrality on 130x162cm canvases. Updates to come.

2020 in Review

So, in 2020, I had a retrospective in January, as previously mentioned in my blog. From February to December, I painted and translated, and I created 13 paintings using 49 canvas panels each measuring 130x162cm, or 51×64″. The following are some of them.

This is my painting of world leaders struggling to contain the COVID pandemic. Included are Mr. Boris Johnson, Ms. Angela Merkel, Mr. Xi Jinping, Mr. Moon Jae-in, Mr. Andrew Cuomo, Ms. Jeong Eun-kyeong, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Mr. Abe Shinzo, and the Buddhist guardian deities the Four Heavenly Kings. I tried to capture major news moments. E.g., Mr. Johnson appears distressed per his bout with the disease, Ms. Merkel is collected as a sign of Germany’s relative success with controlling COVID, Mr. Xi looks worried as a reflection of his situation in the summer of 2020, and Mr. Cuomo is at the painting’s center, in reference to how New York became the world’s COVID epicenter for a time. I painted this in the summer, and therefore the situations I refer to do not include more recent ones. Mr. Moon and Ms. Jeong are looking sharp at center stage, and Dr. Fauci has a look of complete seriousness in his eyes. Mr. Abe looks a bit perplexed and sapped. The beach-goers are also given a quick mention.

This is my sixteen-panel representation of the weekly Gwanghwamun (lit. illumination gate) Square candlelight demonstrations of 2016-2017. I visited one of the demonstrations in 2016 and was impressed by the people’s general warmth and unity. For instance, at a moment’s notice, the entire crowd readily broke into rhythmical and synchronized candlelight waving in a sideways figure eight motion. I included famous people from or related to the vigils, such as President Moon Jae-in (far left), Mr. Baek Nam-ki, the farmer who was fatally hit by a water canon while peacefully protesting in Seoul in 2016 (second from left), the lady who brought a couple of her cows to the protests (third from left), corruption whistle-blower Koh Young-tae and news anchor Son Seok-hee, who first broke the news that started the vigils (third and second from right, respectively), et al. I also included Buddhism’s Four Heavenly Kings, guardian deities, to express my wishes for the people’s success and prosperity.

This painting refers to the rather unfortunate phenomenon of abnormal weather. It is widely accepted that the climate irregularities of recent years is potentially attributable to environmental destruction and that humanity could be headed for an existential crisis if this keeps up. In fact, some argue that we are already facing that crisis. One sign that seemed to clearly point to a need for greater attention to the issue was the heavy rainfall and massive flooding in South Korea in the summer of 2020. Watching those rainstorms, I felt fully warned to look for actionable ways to protect the environment. Hopefully, this painting will serve well as a reminder of that.

Making Art

Since February 2020, just after the close of my retrospective, I have been making art vocationally. If I succeed in enjoying a long career as a full-time artist, I will be one with an atypical decade since college graduation in that I spent most of it doing things other than studio work. Then again, most artist these days presumably have B.F.A.s as opposed to B.A.s, too. In any case, I am an artist, and the most possible good I could generate would come from me making art.

I aim to be decidedly more prolific and exhibit my work much more frequently in the future. What time I had been spending studying art theory in graduate school I can now devote to making art. I concluded my art theory studies in the summer of 2018, and wrote an article for the quarterly Stained Glass in the winter of 2018, but was also spending some time on designing characters for popular contents until this year. Now I am focused solely on painting when I am not translating, although I will still read books and exercise, too. (News: I updated my web site’s fine art portfolio at around the time I had my retrospective: www.hanlee.kr.)

My 2020 Retrospective

I exhibited work I made since 2015 for a couple of weeks in January at Ilgok Gallery. I enjoyed seeing my work all displayed together.

Summer of 2016 to the Present (Summer of 2019)

I continued to translate for art organizations. I exhibited in a couple of trade shows with my Eastern zodiac animal (year sign) characters, in 2017 and 2019. I also got an essay I wrote (“The Stained Glass of Choi Young-Shim”) published in the winter 2018-2019 issue of the Stained Glass Association of America’s quarterly, Stained Glass. I visited Europe and saw the Kassel Documenta, Munster Sculpture Project, Venice Biennale, Louvre, Pompidou Center, British Museum, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Frieze London, etc. in the autumn of 2017. I also received a government grant to make prototypes of mugs, tote bags, baseball caps, multi-use cases and other everyday items with my Eastern zodiac animal designs on them, in 2016 and 2017. I even made cylindrical aluminum cases with relief animal face covers. I got to audit art criticism, glass art and figure drawing courses at the Korea National University of Arts. I have updated my website (http://hanlee.kr) recently, and there are more details on the above there.

The following is a video of my recent Eastern zodiac animal drawings.

My booth at the 2019 Korea Character Licensing Fair

My aluminum tiger container (prototype)

Curatorial Visit to Taipei Fine Arts Museum

(June 22-25, 2016) I traveled to Taipei to help the Gwangju Museum of Art work out plans for its upcoming jointly curated exhibition with the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. I traveled with Mr. Lim Jong-Young, a curator at the Gwangju Museum of Art. In our first evening there, on the 22nd of June, we visited Mr. Chu Teh-I, the director of the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, at his office on the campus of the Taipei National University of the Arts. Mr. Chu is also an artist and will be showing in the upcoming exhibit, tentatively titled, Under the Azure Sky: Between Delight and Discomfort. Mr. Chu is an accomplished abstract painter, and I could see in his works echos of Korea’s Informel paintings. The Taipei National University of the Arts has an impressive campus and the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts had a neat show going on with the Korean artist, Kim Yong-shik’s colorful painting/prints.

On our first full day in Taipei, June 23rd, we met with Ms. Ping Lin, the director of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and attended a meeting with Ms. Jo Hsiao, the co-curator of Under the Azure Sky and a Senior curator at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and a couple of Taiwanese artists who will exhibit in Under the Azure Sky. Ms. Lin was an impressive lady, and she seemed impressed with the upcoming exhibit’s Korean artists’ works Mr. Lim presented to her through images. Our meeting with Ms. Hsiao and the exhibiting artists lasted the entire afternoon. Mr. Lim and I learned that the Taipei Fine Arts Museum has a design specialist for exhibition layouts. One of the artists we met today, to be named later, was planning on using an entire wall inside the Gwangju Museum of Art’s Gallery where Under the Azure Sky is to be held, and the group discussed which wall would be best for it. It was a very interesting day, and I enjoyed the architecture of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s office area, our meeting room in particular.

The meeting continued on June 24th, a day in which Mr. Lim and Ms. Hsiao, with myself interpreting as needed, discussed how where in the exhibition space to display each artist’s work, and met with a couple more exhibiting artists to discuss with them how their works should be installed, from morning through the entire afternoon. The Primary language of the meeting was English, and the artists we met since the day surprised Mr. Lim and I by uniformly speaking English quite comfortably. In any case the exhibit seemed to be coming together quite nicely with the meetings. Ms. Hsiao nevertheless insisted that there was still much work to be done before the exhibit would be completely ready, and Mr. Lim agreed, particularly as he had plenty to figure out in terms of balancing the exhibit’s installation budget on his part, particularly as many of the works were video or installation pieces and required certain devices for their presentation.

This was my first overseas trip solely to attend a curatorial meeting, and it was quite interesting. Under the Azure Sky will be about society’s tension between its accelerated technological innovation and apprehension regarding the potential threat to humanity’s spiritual survival such poses. At the same time, it will also address the viewer’s purely aesthetic needs as well. The exhibit is scheduled to become opened to the public in late August, and all who seek to nurture their senses while contemplating one’s relationship to Information technology, or how best to navigate our ever-changing world,  are welcome.

From left to right: Mr. Chu Teh-I, Mr. Lim Jong-Young and myself, at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts in Taipei.