- Venue
- Aspex
- Location
- South East England
Korean artist Sea Hyun Lee paints large and fantastic ‘mountain and water’ landscapes entirely in red on white. There is a familiarity about the precipitous mountains, waterfalls, lakes and rivers. They resemble Chinese landscapes painted on silk scrolls, the landscapes on which Korean landscape painting was once based.
They are beautiful, but there is also something challenging and restless about these red and white paintings. Appearing at first to offer a gently meditative stroll around an imaginery landscape, one soon encounters a more sinister element. You need not read the explanatory notes to realise that these paintings are about more than the natural world or the spiritual/philosophical worlds of Chinese landscape.
There are no people in the paintings though signs of their presence are evident everywhere. Dotted about between the mountain ranges are areas of ploughed land, small hamlets or humble cottages perched on a hillside, picture-postcard vignettes – a bridge over a stream – a cherry orchard – a railway line winding through a fenced-off pasture.
Painting red on white gives uncertainty to the status of white. Does it represent light, or is it simply a foil to red, necessary for the picture to be readable? There is no consistency in the way white/light falls on the mountains, trees or houses. Sometimes it falls from one direction, sometimes another. Some of the villages are illuminated by lights, bright spheres of light shining out from the top of tall posts, posts too tall for street lights.
The light in these paintings feels like the light of surveillance, bathing the places where people might live or work. But they are empty places, there are no people.
The mountains ranges rise in two-dimensional gradations of red that stand out in relief against the painted (red) scene behind. The position and the size of objects are unclear. Whether at the top, middle or bottom of the picture, the size of an object (a house, a clump of trees) gives no indication of its distance from the viewer. Everything is at more or less the same distance. The landscape has to be read in small chunks, a piece at a time, this piece against that.
The cleverness of these paintings is more fully revealed when you read that Sea Hyun Lee spent his military service near the Demilitarized Zone, looking at the nighttime landscape through night vision googles. You realise that these landscapes are constructed just like a landscape seen bit by bit, through binoculars, and night vision binoculars at that.