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Title | Transfer
Period | 4 Oct. ~ 4 Nov. 2012
Venue | Gallery 2
Website | www.gallery2.co.kr
Artist | Sekyung Lee


Gallery 2 presents the solo show of Sekyung Lee who has built a distinctive art world using hair. It is her second solo exhibition in Korea after returning from Germany. In the show Lee introduces her two-dimensional series Transfer, along with a carpet installation and photographic works. Lee has long worked with hair, studying diverse Eastern and Western patterns. The expansion of her subject to history, culture, economy, and gender is in the exhibition.

From a perfect reproduction of patterns to a chaotic plane

At the moment hair becomes detached from the body, it turns to an object of disgust. Lee’s hair-work has alluded to an irony toward hair, taking note of the moment of a shift in perception. The artist exquisitely represents patterns with hair in ceramics, tableware, tiles, and carpets, provoking optical illusion by displaying them like relics in a museum. In Transfer, the artist blends many elements she has used while researching diverse patterns. Made on chipboard, this work explicitly uncovers the physical property of hair, and focuses on relations therein.

Cultural topography entangled like hair

Patterns used for her work are from historical material: Meissen porcelain, geometric figures of Russian Constructivism, traditional tiles of the Netherlands and Portugal, Chinese and Korean crafts and painting. Each work of the Transfer series shows a projection of a ‘chaotic’ state from the East and West, dispersing and congregating, suggestive of forming a pattern and dynamic relations. Some European traditional patterns were imported from China, and reversely made an impact on the East. The artist highlights such cultural reciprocation and dynamism.

The cycles of the sacred and profane

Purchasing hair the artist realized blond hair exported to Europe from India for wigs was dyed hair Indian women donate to a temple in prayer and wishes. In a photographic work based on this, she demonstrates a process a Southeast Asian Hindu woman’s hair dyed to blonde from black. The carpet work for the floor of the venue has a motif in the act of Indian women painting on the floor to express their faith. The patterns are represented on a black carpet with scattered blond hair imported to and processed in Europe from India. With this the artist depicts cyclic relations in which a religious object in the East is exploited for commercial purpose in global capitalism, used in an artistic context.