CLAUDE BERNARD

Lee Jin Woo (Seoul, 1959) lives and works in Paris. The reaction to Korean colonialism in the 1970s gave rise to a generation of artists breaking with the immediate past: the Dansaekhwa group (monochrome painting in Korean) began to explore the physical limits of materials and their capacity to interact with the viewer, as well as to deepen their Eastern spiritual roots, such as Taoism, Confucianism, or Buddhism. Lee Jin Woo belongs to the next generation, sharing formal similarities with this movement (material, Hanji paper) but without affirming the previous political context.

Lee Jin Woo’s work is realized in an environment of physical and mental exhaustion. Compacted charcoal in transparent layers of Hanji paper is vigorously dragged by a metal brush in an exhausting repetitive movement. On the surface, rough and steep reliefs are created, referencing a possible inner landscape. It is this process of subtracting charcoal and its alchemical spirit that leads Lee Jin Woo’s work to silence. A silence that transforms the “object” into abstraction. The Korean artist’s intention is to suppress any cognitive will to approach the inner “self.”

As in the black paintings of Ad Reinhard, or the late dark paintings of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, here the eye must interact to give “light” to the work. An attentive, prolonged, and profound gaze, necessary to approach the spiritual. The artist works somewhat like a “shaman” who, through intense physical work, surpasses a certain formal intention to channel all his energy into his painting. His work is intuitive and open – his works are untitled – for Lee Jin Woo, artistic discipline is not an end in itself, but a channel of meditation where he develops his work in long periods of elaboration, thus becoming a philosophy of life.

In this process of personal alchemy, Lee Jin Woo, aware of the origin of charcoal, recovers it to generate visual and mental landscapes that echo the origin and end of human existence. The ambivalence between a contemplative dimension and a more tense one converges in his compositions.

Born to an architect father, Lee Jin Woo graduated from the Sejong University College of Fine Arts (Korea) in 1983 and from the University of Paris VIII in 1986. He currently has his studio in Paris, with stays in Beijing and Seoul in recent years. His work is featured in major collections worldwide and has been exhibited in France, the UK, the US, South Korea, China, and Japan.

Solo show Lee Jin Woo

From May 16th to June 29th, 2024