SOO KYOUNG LEE

Soo Kyoung Lee's Paintings Calling Out the Names with Floating Forms and Colors By Kho Chunghwan, Art Critic "I like the symbolic and pure language of poetry" (Artist's Note). Literature is broadly divided into poetry and prose. While prose is based on narrative, poetry aims for symbolic, allusive, and condensed meanings. Soo Kyoung Lee's abstract paintings are like poetry. Like poetry, her abstract paintings are symbolic, allusive, and condensed. Therefore, the poetry she loves and the abstract paintings she creates align perfectly. We could say that paintings and poetry are in dialogue with each other, or that paintings are simply another version of poetry. On the one hand, a closer look at the artist's statement reveals a point of friction between "symbolic poetry" and "pure language." How can she appreciate symbolic, allusive, and condensed language while also favoring a pure language? In the context of poetry, "pure language" refers to a language that is untainted and undefiled. It means a void of meaning, severed from its usual sense, and a void of language, severed from its usual communication. What do these "void" concepts mean? They imply starting from a zero point of meaning, without any preconditions, and then moving toward and arriving at a new destination. This is about expanding meaning to its outside (dehors, as per Maurice Blanchot) and extending language to its outside. Thus, the seemingly conflicting ideas of symbolic poetry and pure language converge through the medium of meaning. The outside of meaning is still meaning. The act of reaching for the outside of language still happens within the framework of a moving language. Symbolic poetry and pure language work together to extend meaning beyond the outside of the representational, narrative, self-referential, or self-identical meaning. Therefore, we can say that the artist begins her painting without any preconceptions, forges her own path as she goes, and arrives at unexpected forms in the process. The core of her paintings is an open form of painting, starting without a premise, acquiring meaning along the way, and reaching an accidental meaning in the process. To elaborate, although she begins without any preconditions, things that unconsciously form a part of the artist—such as her incidental daily life and unconscious memories—seems to be latent within her. At times, these elements can suggest familiar forms and evoke familiar meanings. "Floating forms" (Artist's Note). The artist starts with a flat surface, with fields of color. As is well known, the two-dimensional plane is the primary principle of the modernist paradigm, which is fixated on formal reductionism. This was a concept put forward by Clement Greenberg, who thereby paved the way for Color Field Painting. So, is Soo Kyoung Lee, who begins with a flat surface and color fields, a Greenbergian? At least at the starting point, she appears to be a modernist who references Greenberg. However, her process and results are different. Her paintings show a unique process and outcome that differs from traditional modernist abstract painting, which begins and ends with the flat surface and begins and ends with color fields. This is where her unique artistic identity lies. We should, then, observe how the artist deviates from the orbit of modernist abstract painting that concludes with a flat surface and a color field, and how she establishes her own unique form. We should see how she points to an outside (dehors) and thus expands the modernist paradigm. The artist says she paints floating forms. Indeed, the forms in her paintings seem to float on the flat surface, as if floating in a state of weightlessness. They also look like forms collaged onto the surface. So, why are they floating? What makes her paint the "floating forms"? While this is a product of formal logic and sensibility, would it be too much of an interpretive leap to see in this an allegory for the modern person, who drifts without roots or a fixed destination? This might also be why her works resonate with and appeal to a modern sensibility. These floating forms deviate from and expand the flat surface. But how do they do this? Her paintings look as if the canvas was entirely sealed with colored tape, and then parts of the color field were cut out with a knife, like cutting paper, to reveal the raw surface beneath. It looks as if parts of the color field were sliced open to expose a hidden image underneath, superimposing the outside and inside surfaces of the color field onto a single screen. Some of her works are even more three-dimensional. After a cut-out is made, the forms seem to be lifted by hand, appearing as if they are protruding from the flat surface. This is because a net-like grid structure of lines is superimposed on the flat surface, and the shape is reminiscent of paper crafts. They also recall natural objects like plant veins, landscapes, pinecones, or grains of rice and ears of grains. They evoke tangled balls of yarn and tote bags. Since the images are started without a premise, continue along a path, and are ultimately reached or created in the process, they can evoke any other arbitrary form. Her paintings are works that open spatial depth within the flat surface, blurring and crossing the boundary between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional. Of course, the artist does not actually use colored tape or sheets or cut out paper. These are merely the associations and optical illusions her work creates. This emphasizes her focus on flatness. It’s her own method of redefining the rules of the modernist paradigm—presented as flatness and color fields—by maintaining the flat surface while deviating from it, and by adhering to the flat surface while expanding it. This can be seen as her unique formal logic. From two-dimensional painting, the expansion of the flat surface leads to sculptural painting, and the painting becomes an object or an installation. It’s an expansion of space. In this way, the artist maintains and expands the flat surface by opening spatial depth within it. While she fundamentally expands the flat surface within the flat surface, she also goes further by expanding it beyond the flat surface into the real world. A series of works that introduce colored wooden panels as a kind of transformed canvas demonstrate this. By breaking free from the confines of a limited tableau, a relatively freer spatial operation becomes possible. These works involve assembling colored wooden panel pieces to create a single organic form, which could be called a variation of the color field. These works are based on the relationship between part and whole, where the parts come together to form the whole. What is unique is that the lines where the parts meet are not perfectly straight. While laser cutting could achieve a straight line, the artist dislikes them. She cuts each piece herself with a jigsaw. She prefers an organic line that includes gaps, much like nature and its physiology. These gaps seem like breathing paths and passageways for the work to rest. This reflects her inherent sensibility. The artist hangs these forms on walls, lays them on floors, and stands them in space. When hung on the wall, they can be seen as a transformed or expanded version of the tableau. When they are lying on the floor and stand in space with wooden structures that also serve as supports, they expand into a form of spatial installation work. These are variable space installations that intervene in and interact with the space, re-setting our space experience. A more active case is her site-specific work, such as installations in old cathedrals or castles. Her colorful Color Field Paintings mediate and intervene in these spaces, where natural light passing through stained glass windows is added to the antiquated hues of the plaster walls and bricks. It feels like an encounter between ancient and modern, a conversation between different eras. It could be said that she is re-setting our experience of time in these historic sites—houses of time themselves—where time seems to flow so slowly. Furthermore, a series of her doorplate works are noteworthy. In these works, the artist reinterprets the unique names engraved on various doorplates into reconfigured forms of various colored fields. This reflects her long-standing interest in the issue of identity. I believe these works suggest the future potential of her practice to encompass sociological concerns. I think of this work as calling out the myriad names of people, each one so diverse, vibrant, and multifaceted, and in so doing, inviting each one into a dialogue. Perhaps, even beyond the doorplate works, the artist's entire body of work does this to some extent. This critique was written to commemorate Soo Kyoung Lee's solo exhibition, at the Woonjoong Gallery in September 2025.