A man is slogging uphill with his back to a monochrome landscape. Wherever he goes, his swaying body and stooped posture represent that he is painstakingly moving forward. It looks as if he is given greetings from neither of his surroundings, the magnificent buildings in the back, shabby dust fences, and walls of someone's house. (Indeed, any of these interacts with another which remains separated). The man is struggling in these heterogeneous components. Neither adapting day-to-day changes nor getting bored of repeated daily routines, he is wearily wandering in the unfriendly space with basic living conditions.
Hojin Lee, in his prior works, has actively filled the huge canvas with overflowing energy. There were always meaningful visual codes that Lee hid in his energetic paintings in a single and strong breath. The audience were drawn into internal space in which they come to face the ambiguous and complex implications of the codes. However, Lee, in the present exhibition, observes the figures and their daily routines in weary life spaces at some distance and indirectly involves in these spaces, rather than actively expressing his emotions.
Lee has freely 'involved' in the frame in which he kept images loosely printed in blue remained still. He did not try to conceal the real images as he did in past works; rather, decided to show just as it is. This is his efforts to connect the heterogeneous components as an observer. In the picture with a man wandering wearily, the dust fences and walls are almost hidden in bushes. In another picture, the traces of life are destroyed for redevelopment and the ruined space is full of dust and stones. Then, Lee draws thick plants on it to make the space filled with the movement of life.
<0908 Eulji-ro> is a common view that you can see in any of side streets during Summer. People come to open their own feasts after work sitting between buildings. Hojin Lee pays attention to 'Eulji-ro' among many streets which are commonly discovered on a Summer afternoon. 'Eulji-ro' is a special area in which dwelling sites and business districts, small traders and big enterprises, passer-bys and street vendors co-exist in disorder. This complicated and confused look of Eulji-ro' is reflected in Lee's work that he overlaps and indistinctly draws outlines of the picture image and inserts images after erasing the lines in order for the existence of objects to be drawn to the world of uncertainty. The sky with blue and aglow colors reveals that the existence of individuals enjoying their own time becomes lost further. Hojin Lee interprets the city as a various forms of existences, not as a space of structures. Although it seems as if individuals adapt themselves to the logic of where they belong, their space is, in fact, a world of disorder where they fail to settle and wander around with lost identity. In present exhibition, Hojin Lee actively uses objets and images that he acquired through wandering around the city by himself. Lee draws the images of men in the city on a cloth that he brought from the construction site, abruptly produces magazine collages, and sumps up the numbers written on a worn piece of paper. Through the objects that had lost their existence values, Hojin Lee cynically exposes the light and dark sides and ills of our society. Social systems, regardless of whether it advances toward the better or worst, run around with everything entangled but seem to be perfectly working on the surface. Individuals also seem to adapt or oppose to the social systems but their existence values, in reality, become lost in the process. At this point, we might need to admit ourselves that are wandering in the social system with lost existence values and to look around what surrounds us at some distance, like Hojin Lee has done.
By Daebum Lee / Art Critic
