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○ Exhibition Information
Artist | Lee Sook-ja
Title | Colorful Journey
Period| March 9 ~ April 1, 2012 (Busan: Apr. 4 ~ Apr. 17)
Opening Reception| March 9, Fri. 2012 05:00pm Gana Art Center
Artist Talk| March 17, Sat. 2012 03:00pm Gana Art Center Academy Hall
Place | Gana Art Seoul, Korea
Hours | 10:00am - 7:00pm Monday - Sunday
Tel | 02-720-1020
Website | www.ganaart.com


Lee Sook-Ja’s Barley Field:
A Yearning for Rustic Abundance
Lee Ku-Yeol / Art Critic

Lee Sook-Ja’s art essay collection Eve’s Barley Field (1991) illustrates her life as an artist and contains a number of narratives about her portrayal of the barley field. By depicting her initial passion toward the project, the rich, rural colors of enticement, and a portrait of a nude woman as a legendary image of the barley field, she has created her proprietary genre referred to as “barley field eroticism.” She provides an explanation of her unique style in one of the essays.

The Eve’s Barley Field series is associated with secret romance in the barley field, something that is facetiously told as a common affair in rural communities throughout Korea. Ironically, however, the artist excludes Eve’s male partner Adam, thereby allowing Eve’s sense of purity to pervade the canvas. Nonetheless, the barley field provides a mundane backdrop that symbolizes the erotic.

In the essays, Lee presents a very candid imagination and re-creation of the erotic scene, and the whole project can be read like an epic poem. After rice, barley or wheat has long been regarded as the most important crop in Korean farmlands. Those who have experienced the seasonal elegance of farming have deep feelings about barley fields. Thanks to her relentless efforts to develop the nostalgia and flavor of these barley fields into an extravagant series since the late
1970s, Lee has been endowed with the nickname “barley field artist” and this particular focus has been highlighted as a vital aspect of the artist’s distinct creative achievements.

As time has passed, the remarkable series has renewed its internal elements of expression, evoking various emotional pursuits. Lee deploys vivid and intense mineral colors on Korean mulberry paper, which is solidly laminated in multiple layers to produce realistic yet unique grass—green ears of barley or waves of gold during harvest. The compass of her artwork, which spans several decades, can be found in the colorful art pieces in the aforementioned essay collection and in the catalogue printed for the exhibition Lee Sook-Ja’s Life & Color, her retrospective exhibit held at Goyang Aram-Nuri Arts Center Aram Museum in 2008. In short, Lee’s repertoire beams with an extraordinary and sharp desire to express herself, which is something that I have appreciated for a long time.


The Eve’s Barley Field series continues to this day and offers awe-inspiring images. The emotional perspective, the seasonality and vitality of resplendent colors that lyrically accompany rustic weeds, and the luscious allure of wildflowers are objects of love that display the rural colors that the artist has always held close to her heart. To implement realistic representations of barley that has grown ears and
ripened, each plump grain is made to protrude like sculptural relief, a creative formative technique that has attracted attention since its inception.

Most of Lee’s barley field paintings take on a horizontal composition. At the same time, she captures a specific frame from a vast and far - reaching barley field and fills her canvas with all—over painting, imbuing it with the artist’s profound sensibility and emotional perspective, and allowing viewers to indulge in rustic nostalgia. Lee’s unparalleled ability to manipulate bright colors is one of her most distinguished artistic achievements. At the same time, the sentimental themes she chooses to represent make it easier for us to appreciate and understand her work.

Works such as The Blue Barley Wave - Mangcho Flowers, Yellow Butterfly, Four Seasons of Barley Field, The Autumn Barley, The Window Commands a Barley Field, The Golden Barley Field, and The Wind Barley, depict seasonal atmospheres created by the fields of barley and convey tremendous admiration for the life and surroundings of Korean farmlands.

Nonetheless, Lee’s expressions are not confined to mere descriptions of the superficial. Having experienced a rural lifestyle as a child, Lee has a vivid imagination that swims with a child’s memories and earliest sense of self. Barley sprouts under clean blankets of snow during winter and grows by overcoming adverse conditions, and “the tenacious vitality symbolizes the spirit of Korean people” writes Lee in her essay. As such, each canvas holds multiple meanings. While Eve’s Barley Field, the series that has been the artist’s focus since the late 1980s, has been the subject of many discussions, her bold and unapologetic nude paintings of women have stirred up notable social debates.

A naked young lady with bright skin lying in a verdant barley field, her dark pubic hair intentionally exaggerated to attract attention, is simply unprecedented in the works of any traditional Korean artist. Such a painting was bound to create a buzz. Lee offers a clear explanation about her work: “The presence of nudity in a field of barley is of inevitable consequence. Eve’s Barley Field was drawn on the premises of Korean people’s barley field eroticism (and not to represent female physical sexuality).”

For a long time, young men and women in rural parts of Korea have met in the fresh and smooth barley fields in early summer to share love and romance, and such stories are found in a number of romantic fiction pieces. Lee came up with Eve’s Barley Field in order to formulate such intriguing folktales into the idea of Korean barley field eroticism. The artist decided to name her nude woman Eve, identified in the Bible as the first woman on Earth. Perhaps the artist wanted the woman to radiate a pure and mystic aura. In other words, the Eve of Genesis, whom Lee, as a female artist, admires, has vividly emerged from the Korean folktales of barley field with an erotic posture.

Such erotic nudity is gracefully integrated into the sparkling mood of the barley field in the series as a symbol of aesthetic imagination and as a form of expression that combines the artist’s creative and literary sensibilities. In her latest works after the exhibition at Goyang Aram-Nuri Arts Center Aram Museum, such as Eve’s Barley Field and Eve in Dazzling Flowers, Lee has continued to explore the topic of natural reality in the fields of barley and their surroundings. The canvases offer an ongoing journey through the expression of the mature power of the artist’s brushstroke and animated coloration, and
of the artistic significance of a profound imagination.