Soom-The Second Story: Evaporating Simulacra Landscape 

- To mark Gap Lee solo exhibition 

By Joo Sung-yeol, Adjunct Professor of Art Philosophy at Sejong University 

Deul-soom (Inhalation) – Submerged images 

As one assuming the end of the world cannot but live every moment devotionally, Lee came to believe an impoverished life can attain a connection with a pure, sublime value. ------- I also believe, since his desolate mental state makes him paint, he can display strength by relying on his life and will to embrace the world and remain pure. 

(Excerpts from Gap Lee solo show Soom I catalog essay) 

Gap Lee’s work Soom is ready to breathe. In the first Soom exhibition metaphoric metamorphoses of lobsters and mole-crickets show study of personal identity and sublimity, and the second Soom exhibition is a reflection of life now and essential exploration of nature. The artist explored desperate isolation and wounds hidden in the first show but remains determined in his second show, of contemplative landscapes pushing away pain. Projecting his inner self onto lobster desire, Lee made a fresh start integrating consciousness into objects through sensibility. 

His recent works appear ambiguous in subject and object, and look fantastic, and paradoxically dull, because he addresses objects familiar to us through awkwardness. Truth or wisdom here is not special but ordinary, but awareness is required in understanding his sayings like, “Mountains are mountains, water is water.” Lee’s work starts from a common landscape, which he explores after finding it by chance. Trivial subject matter he uses looks common but provokes awkwardness, indicating an artist’s longing for utopia, reflecting Gilles Deleuze’s statement “Art is not a representation of experience but a creation of new experience.” 

A rhythmical deep-breath reflects our spiritual state. Lee re-distributes his sensibility of the landscape and divides this in two, to breathe differently. His dual landscapes may be a passive way to reveal truth. Even though it is impossible to reveal his inner intentions completely, his journey remains persuasive. A purified landscape is one in which life incorporates a life of the mind. Like breath being beyond perception, and also the life-rhythm of every moment, it may be hard to find any string of consciousness here. His painting has unfamiliar scenes transcending concrete imagery, it seems made through depaysement. 

Nal-soom (exhalation) and deul-soom (inhalation) – visional simulacra images 

A landscape created at the tip of a brush provokes devout atmosphere in which sorrow and solace dwell. All humans feel desolation before nature, and rage at its devastation as nature is a place where humanity’s gloomy past and bright future combine. 

(Excerpts from Gap Lee solo show Soom I catalog essay)

Lee’s scenes interweave regular, close nal-soom and deul-soom. A realistic view of deul-soom and inner scene of nal-soom are the source of a present moment in a visional landscape. For the artist, a landscape begins from communion with reality through illusory breaths. His facing of objects is indirect perception through the senses and a reflection on spiritual rhythm and resonance. Pronunciation is an external act at the oral cavity while sound is internal at the lower part of the abdomen. Sound comes from a deep place, following breaths. As a baby breathes through the abdomen, the body becomes a musical instrument generating resonance through open space. Lee’s painting is akin to this: his painting reflects external breath growing dim with deep inhalation. 

The artist focuses habitually on desolate, vague scenes: reflected images engender intentional inconvenience and then gradually evaporate. Lee pursues multiplicity through ‘defamiliarization’ derived from a vague effect of appearing and disappearing and mutual clashes. Parts dried landscapes clash are read to be linked to unknown space-time. All feel cold as if being dried in a freezer, since nature does not accepted as reality. Part of the self we meet with our eyes closed rejects being otherized. Like the longing that lacks reality and returns as echoes, regret and sadness appear as a universal anxiety. A landscape as a reconstruction of experience and as a sign shows the cycles of growth and decay as simulacrum with no similarity with the real.  

The space applied with reflections is turned into an imaginary illusory space bearing the hope of life, engendering a poetic state. Lee may undergo such optical illusion through special cases. He perceives elements fused with his emotion, and produces material images through a combination with objects. The artist has his intrinsic attitude as an observer and manipulator. 

Lee’s landscape feels like a murmur as a whole. Like Deleuze’s ‘anonymous murmur’ we can hear an insignificant murmur in his work. In the landscape featuring a ferryboat and a car I used for transportation remain stopped, ‘the world existed’ communicates with ‘the world to exist’. Michelangelo argues “We may be blind by illusions or contemplate things different from what we see, depending on visual angles at the same time.” Lee exploits variable images ever-changing by objective, subjective elements as his modeling language. The background seems faithful to its role of backing up the subject feeling confused and hesitating in silence. Boarding a boat or ascending a ladder is not the end. A move is completed when one takes off from the boat and his feet touches the ground. 

Nal-soom, evaporating images 

Lee’s landscape appears mystic as the boundary between life and death vanishes. There is also a contradiction between the two worlds: death enriches life and life affirms death despite a blockade between the two worlds. Lee’s landscape serves as momentum to extend the breadth of understanding and love for life, revealing his awareness of life embracing death in that death does not confront life but rather lies in life. 

(Excerpts from Gap Lee solo show Soom I catalog essay)

We may notice a sign of some change through the observation of a situation. A painting’s can also be revealed through such observation. Anxiety bound to some situation is sensed in the way of concealing and revealing one’s pain or relation. Concentrating on depiction differs from depicting facts. An appreciator thus feels uneasy even if he or she knows the artist’s experience is authentic through his work as the artist does. 

Lee’s attitude based on affinity and rigorous inspection is eloquently represented in his character not to endure sufferings those he love undergo. The artist’s sensitivity is a weapon engendering a miracle closed within objects. What is presumed is he was caught by a vivid longing whenever undergoing bitter frustrations in life. Guillaume Apollinaire encourages us to “go ahead when spiritually dried” For the artist who seeks true self with tireless verve and awakened spirit, an unrealistic image is meaning, and form is none other than content.

If reviewing meticulous signs repetitively, we come to find the artist examining concreteness in life more realistically. Guy de Maupassant was confident of a progress in our accumulated perception, saying that “We can discover some aspect nobody has seen and commented so far, examining what we want to express fully carefully for long.” Our concern that a balloon is filled up with wind is caused by the instability of unconscious expressions lending excessive meaning to informal things. As mentioned above, this form of expression puts hackneyed landscapes before consciousness, and seems to lack in strength to attain what his painting seeks and draw viewers to his painting. Another stage going through his deep, long breath is probably required to reduce them to a special pictorial image.

His landscape with no self of minute sensibility is lyric yet banal. The artist who appear free yet vague like an invisible man at times emerges far away from the landscape. Fruit with a high sugar content tends to be worm-eaten and rotten with ease. Life has to be aggressively exposed to the external world, and a sweet poison must be vomited. I asserted before that a work of art is a depiction of fictitious worlds, and has no practical force to change the world. However, I never mean art is a lethargic world that cannot reflect and present the world. The loss of senses means the decay of beings, not merely a paralysis of consciousness. 

Dedicated to Gap Lee’s Private Exhibition

- Hand-standing Spiritual Eyes(心眼) Staring at Death-

Body ends up with sand, body which cannot starts from sand but flows to sand, body which splits into finest grains that no longer can be split but only is flown away by wind and no longer can be called as a body, wondering sand, drifting sand, sand lifted up by a storm fly from an empty to another empty sky in a group, ones belong to no body, nobody’s bones, nobody’s flesh.....Extract from <Sand Men> by Seung-ho Choi 

Prolog

His long hesitation is probably the evidence that he has lived, with a feeling that he is lack of awareness of the existence of objects. The form of works transforming from experience to awareness is the conclusion of long wait and the change reflects longing and regret. Since his Private Exhibition in 2003, the artist might have become disillusioned about life due to his post-traumatic stress disorder after the sad and incomprehensible incidents and he became focused on identifying and molding the transcendental world underlying in natural symptoms by using spiritual eyes(心眼) that he acquired during the time of suffering. His works based on bodies which react to unfair situations while being at the state of overly sensitive to a certain stimulus are connected to care and love towards vanishing things. In other words, they reconstruct and present lost moments by molding the harsh conditions which make people aware of the potential of love and such results generated from agony arouse the sense about inexistence in any cases. 

Despite of one’s confidence of being strong; however, the effort to fix a transcendental image within daily experiences rustles due to lack of elasticity. Sad illusion adheres to reason and death itself which you experience in the border of life becomes a form of a life. Nevertheless, as those who assume the end of the world cannot help but living a devout life at every single moment, the artist must have built a faith that all lives are, despite its distressful process, connected to a pure and lofty value in the end. Awareness of reason and giving-up in life may be just the other side of the coin. Wounds caused from people must be healed by people and wounds from nature must be consoled by nature.

The artist, as a concept artist, has mainly used lyrical landscape of nature as a material. Now he turns from his usual path to climb a new path, possibly because he realized that his passion was not vigorous anymore in the accustomed path. His fear-being a good painter might mean being clumsy at ordinary life and doing painting might only hurt painting-changed into a cherished desire. Therefore, I make a diagnosis that self-awareness and foresight which suffer affliction in the course of objectified and worn-out life are working under close co-relation to remove the obsession on conventionalized molding language. 

Remembering something can mean staying in the initial and pure passion for a long time but it can also mean being aware of everything in depth which wears out surroundings. I believe that all the thickness of reality becomes the depth of painting and weak mind will be visualized because of the pureness of life which expands along with time. I also believe that since his desolation towards the world made him to create paintings, he can display his strength by relying on the left life and express his will to embrace the world and still remain pure. 

Getting to know…

Most of the works employed the method to sublimely put grotesque images of lobsters-with hard shell-or mole crickets in the air, or phantasmal images majestically pose themselves within the illusion of reflection causing dizziness. A crustacean like lobsters means to the artist a monolog representing the window of mind and realization of the fact that life reaches to the state of death. One day, this opens to him in a way which no life can dare to pass through or cannot be penetrated. The artist deduces that the energy concentrated in the-firmly swollen and antiseptic processed-lobsters’ shells protects life from violence by eradicating oneself and holding impossible life. This deduction is based on the belief that the thickness of reality can reach to the core of existence which can no longer change into inexistence while erasing the external beings.

An image configuring living things-which are created through meditation-is lofty like an inquirer or a prophet who faces death in a dessert. It sometimes reminds of the Saint who bore the Holy Cross for salvation of mankind. Vigorous living things playing the central role in the works as an object of potential do not separate human beings from death but strongly imply the internal urge on death and extinction by expanding the image to the universal context. This is the artist’s intention to aggressively address the risk of industrialization by putting the vanishing landscape up front and also his effort to understand creation, transformation, and generation endlessly continue through the decline of beings. Something like the core of existence still remains in the world where all creation destroys and death often acts as a shield against this destruction; just like grass grow up amidst the destroyed ruins. 

Even though this series of works does not include any extreme metaphor, logic more than simple visual information is required to understand the works. For instance, we acknowledge the tragedy of surrounding things which are losing the organic relationship with the nature by looking at things like sand whose form dismantles in appropriately designed space or forms whose body has evaporated and demolished. To identify a being which has lost its unity and declined into a divided part, we need the background information about tragedy and insight inherited in the being. We can only peek the artist’s intention to lead the uniqueness of each being to universality only in the next phase of the phase above under the assumption that the above phase is completed. 

Volatile and yet sharp imagination fills the surroundings with sparkling chaos and is similar with a playful game which is fun and exciting amidst dizzy and confusing senses. Despite all the sparkling, the artist sees the world with such a pain like images of unstable dimension-which break organic continuance-, images whose form is not clear, and anamorphosis of images which can be found in watery eyes of a person who has unfortunate memories and pain. 

The background metaphors the air polluted by yellow sand and environmental pollution and diagnoses the situation where human beings transiently drift and dismantle like ‘body which splits into finest grains that no longer can be split but only drifts around the dessert, is flown away by wind and no longer can be called as a body’ from <Sand Men> by Seung-ho Choi. Skies which lost the original lively blue color and are full of yellow sand try to shake dusts off but the dust already has formed the entire body. This implicates the fact that firm resolution dismantles in life like sand and everything beautiful and vicious have been homogenized in life. A background at times becomes the whole massage of a painting. There is nothing awe in a material city where the border between divine things and secular things collapse. A true communication has also diminished. Even though valuable sacrifices have been continuously made, nothing draws attention because we are no longer interested in one another. 

The paintings also take a dissolving view. The city view sliding with anamorphosis images are afraid of facing self-reflection image. Something visible at the moment of looking is a mere deception of immediacy and the reality which is dispersing like fog or devastated stands as strange reality. Lumps of memories left from the days of life and dizziness go down and lie on cold floor. The nature of flooring is to hold and sustain the pressing weight but the floor on the screen coldly treats the beings coming towards it as if pushing them away. 

The artist coats this not-penetrating world with vulnerable parts of life. The logic of reality is repeatedly denied with non-materialism of materialism of objects and supernatural landscape which the border demolishes, destroys and reconstructs. The glamorous appearance of life is torn apart without reserve and the social norms and orders are ignored and overturned. Life staying in the air shows the tense going against the law of gravity and the flow of time. It is the natural order that life declines towards death; however, demolished beings are reborn dreaming and pursuing a new life. After all the process, would they finally think of the end of death with ecstatic joy being away from time and space. 

The grotesque images embodied as languid mole crickets and hollow lobsters illustrate the misery of destructed humanity. Life which should live a long life appears languid and conforming despite its hard shells. In the time of exchange values, the uniqueness of objects and human beings are occupied with false consciousness and it can be a firm lesson that lobsters or mole crickets-a victim-whose talent never succeed in social expression eventually end up with self-destruction not self-development.

The artist responds not by acknowledging there is a life in impure and disgusting reality but by denying it. The artist’s narration starts at the very point. Lives which straighten up the last remaining life in a very serious way and choose extinction attentively listen to lives’ sad stories. The weight of ideology is too significant to put up a cliché placard saying ‘complaint on global material civilization which has been urbanized into one landscape; however, we should value the aspect that the meaning is realized by a person who passed through a vast cave called awareness. That is because cliché is nothing but universality. 

Epilogue

There is mystery where the border of life and death disappears in Gap Lee’s landscape. There is also contradiction that it cannot go either way between the two worlds but enriches life through death and acknowledges death through life. In the sense that death does not confront against life but lies within it, the awareness of life embracing death reveals and it, in turn, becomes a momentum to expand the understanding of life and width of love. 

Therefore, the substantial works also aims to investigate the origin of nature with nature-orientated attitude which exists in the nature and conforms to the harmonious world, rather than being an observer outside of the nature as a presentational symbol by building mental value and expanding the range of awareness prior to combination and embodiment of the nature before eye. When entering the nature now, the artist realizes that he has grown as big as his world. The attitude which does not remain formally expressing the nature but seeks for nature’s consent seemingly comes from the eager hope that his expression can move the public’s mind. 

He might still miss honest landscape paintings but he started this work with the intention to have a special cycle by choosing the fruit of solitude about the circumstances and relations of the era. They are the results of transforming the quality of solitude by choosing a lonely path like somebody who crossed a harsh dessert and one’s other self who live a new life. Once life, how trivial and disjointed it is, gathers up all scraped fragments and recovers the organic relation with the universe, the passage between the two worlds naturally opens. 

Now the artist turns his eyes about life to inner world. He has become aware of the fact that eyes which cannot see life from inside would never understand anything. Dawn lightening the daybreak penetrates darkness and stands up tall above everything ominous and there will be transcendence at both ends of rising and descending. The paintings open a passage to the world beyond death and practice the death. Long-kept passion rises and flutters for the hand-standing dream. 

For the sake of righteousness of his paintings, he meticulously identifies distress conditions and follows applicable code of practices. Thus, he hopes the landscape created at the tip of paintbrush has devout atmosphere nuanced with sorrow and condolence like the hardship he made his way through. All human beings would inevitably feel desolate before the vast nature; however, facing the devastated nature holds anger that you cannot give up because that is where the dark past and white future of human beings lie within. 

The artist also expects the landscape painting of Ecotopia as a awakened self who navigates in the pursuit of substance. When formativeness lacks, one tends to rely on meanings. On the contrary, once you are sure of materials and methods, you try to insightfully express the internal world of emotion of human beings. Nevertheless, art works are simple logical delusion of emotional images but are not the implementing power to encourage the public to do valuable things. I hope the fatigue felt from paintings is not such aftermath. Because even while the artist is trapped in his own castle, the aesthetic sense of the public will rapidly develop in depth. 

Joo Sung-yeol  (Adjunct Professor, Art Philosophy, Sejong Univ)