SEOUL, April 30 (Xinhua) -- Instead of a brush, Lee Gil-woo held a bunch of incense sticks and lit them. This South Korean artist has gained wide recognition for introducing a new technique of using incense in Korean paintings.
With burning incense, he created numerous holes on hanji, or traditional Korean mulberry paper, and grafted two or three of these pieces of papers side by side. His idea of piercing hanji with incense was inspired by an intense visual experience he had while looking at the sky through abundant leaves of a ginkgo tree in the autumn of 2003.
Lee said it looked as if the ginkgo leaves were burning with fire in the reflection of the white sky, and the spectacle brought to mind burning incense. Lee's artworks are completed through repeated process of burning hanji with incense or an iron, which the artists describes as somewhat similar to the eternal cycle of birth and death. In tune with the doctrine of transmigration of souls which says that all life turns to ash after death and is born again, the artist creates new images with holes produced through the recurrent extinction of process of burning paper.
The strong impressions of his works combined with his experiments with materials and techniques have brought him to prominence in South Korea's art scene. Lee said he has striven to apply new materials to challenge the limits of traditional Korean paintings, and in the process he discovered his own, unique painting technique.
"It's a challenging spirit, which drives (artists) to find newness. It is a basic attitude all artists should have in mind most fundamentally," said Lee. "The artists should have no fear. We should continue to carve out something new and try to find our own language." Lee creates paintings composed of layered sheets of hanji whose surfaces have been perforated by incense sticks or soldering irons. These paper layers produce images that are partially visible and partially obscured by those above and below.
The distinctive characteristic of Lee's works is the visual dissonance resulted from several layers of images that challenges viewers' perceptions and eliminates the possibility of a single reading. He has employed a variety of images in his work, seeking combinations that depict such dualities as tradition and modernity, spirituality and materialism, East and West.
He reinterprets and transforms traditional Korean paintings by combining landscape borrowed from classic paintings with portraits of famous living people. Lee explained that he finds beauty in human's natural figure and behavior and that practices the idea of expressing the beauty of nature through human images.
He held his first solo exhibition in the United States in February last year, featuring pop culture icons like Andy Warhol, Michael Jackson, and Audrey Hepburn. In the exhibition, the pop culture icons were combined with architectural scenes, and two extremes melded in one screen showed that multi-culture coexisted beyond the collision of eastern and western culture.
Lee said he came to a full realization of the growing interest in art from South Korea after his U.S. exhibition garnered much attention there. He then stressed that active government support is needed in order to nurture more South Korean artists of international standing. "If national-level policies could provide government-backed infrastructure that can discover and raise talented people, they will be able to fully and freely stretch their talents and will eventually grow into artists with global competitiveness," Lee said.
