Space Explorations by an Emotional Cubist – Lee Yoon-mi’s Recent Work
Erwin Panofsky asserted in 1924 in his book Perspective as Symbolic Form(DiePerspektiv als Symbolische)that perspective in Western painting is a sort of symbolic form. Perspective is not natural but artificial. According to Karatani Kojin, “Perspective is a device to lend depth to two-dimensional space through perspectival representation.” That is to say, perspective is a regulation, or an agreement, applicable to a specific age, that may under certain circumstances be annulled. That is, another regulation for moving the world into two-dimensional space is possible. To this, Panofsky considered the perspective that sees the world as it appears to the eye, not as the world from a fixed point of view. A world with an apparent shape that accords with the shape of the eye. Panofsky pointed out that painterly space respecting this eye perspective, is often found in medieval painting, before perspective was invented.
This style of perception is perhaps one way to reject the fixed perspective, one of the presuppositions of modern perception, before considering painting that is without a vanishing point, or no fixed point of view. Cubism is a good example, to which Lee Yoon-mi’s painting relates. Lee’s space, however, is more emotional and sensuous than typical cubist space, and can thus be called a form of ‘Emotional Cubism’. This emotional cubist forms her own space, depending on her feelings. Her pictorial space emerges, when emotions are evoked and then linked with each other. In her work, the basic rule of perspective, where something close to the viewer is large and something far away is small, is largely disregarded. Lee highlights what brings about a specific feeling, or lends weight to something mundane.
The space this emotional cubist creates looks contradictory to us, generates a poetic quality, and is full of diverse movement and multiple meanings. In her space, Lee fabricates narratives through combinations of heterogeneous elements, which form psychological dramas reflecting her inner self. In such drama, strange atmospheres are evoked through the outward interweaving of scenes from her subconscious. Lee’s pictorial space looks like a stage! In it, signs float, and continuously combine with various signifiers.
The two major axes leading her signs’ movement are similarity and proximity. A tree links to piece of ceramic, then links to a round chest, while reeds link to the image of hair. A window seen from an interior associates with the nearby landscape too. Simultaneously, still life and landscape, which is neither still-life or nor landscape, appears through Lee’s entanglement of still-life and landscape-like elements, so Lee’s space appears multifaceted.
Cubist painting moved away from visional depth by rejecting a single point of view. The point of view in cubist space moves from one point to another point at the surface, rather than moving at a distance from the surface, to a single, distant point. Lee’s painterly space lies in this context, in that it produces multifaceted space. So in Lee’s work, movement appears as actually physical. The thing before my eyes seems to be on the top, if seen from a lying position. The thing by me now seems to be before me, if slightly turning my body. A broad area may look like thin lines, if seen from a certain position.
Lee’s cubist space becomes three-dimensional through her process of visualizing the ‘being nearby’ or ‘being close’. In other words, her work becomes something like a relief, while it remains painterly space, spatially extended from a painting, not for example from a sculpture. These protrusions however, makes Lee feel uneasy because for her, movement is possible only following the precondition of there being a framework in her painting.
Her work, to return three-dimensionality to two-dimensionality, thus begins. It involves decorativeness, and glittering; a black huge shadow that looks like a teacup, provoking a queer feeling, with in the mixture of its surroundings. It seems Lee, this emotional cubist, is gaining momentum for her intellectual experiments from odd emotion!
By Hong Ji-seok / Art Critic
