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Hyung Mo Lee's practice reflects many of the aesthetic and philosophic strategies associated with the Italian Arte Povera (literally poor art) movement whose artists attacked corporate mentality with an art of unconventional materials and style, often incorporating found objects in their works. Lee's drawings, sculptures, and installations are notable for their radical choice of materials and emphasis on laborious, time-consuming process. His Sumi Ink drawings, both delicate and dynamic, are meditations on geologic time - strata rendered brush-stroke by brush-stroke - while sculptural works expand on lessons learned from drawing. Found objects are negotiated to the point of transformation, often bordering on dissolution, always stressing materiality and physicality, evocative of myth over scientific rationalism.
The title of the Show, Be Friends with your Burning is from a poem by Rumi.
The following is an exerpt:
"...I don't hear the words
That broken-open lowliness is the reality,
not the language! Forget phraseology.
I want burning, 'burning'.
Be friends
with your burning. Burn up your thinking
and your forms of expression!..."
Artist Statement regarding the show:
Primarily, I would like to show wall works, new stuff I've been working on since my return from Spain. In these works, I'm using a paintbrush which I've not used in many years. It's a drawing practice, back to basics, a practice that will lead to, I would think, a larger scope of what's to come from practice. The works are somewhat figurative, abstract scrawls, and clumpy gooey sculptural materials slopped onto paper that make them very textured. It's transitional work, not fully formed yet a starting ground. The feel coincides with my recent move to San Pedro as well as my return from Spain of which the memory still resonates strongly and it's full effect not yet sorted and unrealized. I feel moved, literally and figuratively, transposed. And in this state of mind I want to burn up my personal history and the lessons learned that reside within and make work with a renewed, fresh, novel, even a naive mind.
Born in Seoul, Korea, youngest of two sons to teachers of language, Lee graduated from the LA County High School for the Arts in '99, followed by stints at the San Francisco Art Institute and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Thereafter, long drives around North America until settling again in Los Angeles. Fellowships and Awards include 2013-2016 Angels Gate Cultural Center Studio Artist Program, San Pedro, CA, and 2011 Poetry Scholarship, Fall Poetry Workshop with Cecilia Woloch. Los Angeles, CA., Can Serrat, Spain, June 2015, Incubarte 7, Valencia, Spain, July 2015
the LOFT 3rd floor
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