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Meditative Gesture: The Contemplative Allure of Hyunmee Lee’s Paintings
-Dr. Bruce Adams
I think the meditative gesture is one of the individualities in my work. The two
words are
contradictory: the meditative seems like a slower process and needs
repetition, whereas
gesture sounds spontaneous and quick. I like to have the two
feelings combined.
(Hyunmee Lee, artist’s notes, 2008)
By the artist’s own admission, the very notion of a “meditative gesture,” or action in stillness,
is a paradox. It provokes us to consider how spontaneity, in the form of a quickly executed
line or brushstroke, can be invested with such an intensity of purpose that it becomes the
summation of a longer process of steady deliberation. Yet in urging us to focus on the
quixotic essence of her mark, Hyunmee Lee is asking us to join with her in the very arena of
her painting. Whether it is through the perusal of a solitary calligraphic curve, a broad slash
of clean black, or the barely visible spatial maneuvers between the pale tonal planes that
support those other elements, the viewer is drawn into the dynamics of the artist’s own
“abstract gaze.” Through the intercession of a concentrated gesture, the complementary roles
of artist and viewer come together in an encircling arch of esthetic meditation.
In writing about the contemplative allure of Hyunmee Lee’s art, I feel I must dispense with
many of the assumptions of formal disinterest that normally frame the perspectives of an art
historian, curator or critic. My early acquaintance with the artist has privileged my particular
view of her art. For this reason I want to preface my commentary with an acknowledgment of
the ongoing correspondence that has kept me in contact with this Korean-born painter
throughout the years we have lived on different continents. While I consider my own role in
her development to be marginal, I know the gratitude she feels to all those who,
independently of each other, have nurtured and supported her faith in her own creative
destiny. Given the autobiographical implications of her art, it is hard to separate my
understanding of the artist herself from the feelings I attribute to her language of gesture.
It says a lot about Lee’s convictions that, while she has expanded into new territories of the
imagination during her adopted life in America, she has remained conceptually loyal to her
foundations as an Asian-Pacific artist. For her, the past is a living spirit, and the residues of
personal and cultural histories continue to inform the content of her work. How the viewer in
turn articulates that content is one of the teasing but rewarding problematics of her work.
Art can be a demanding obsession that produces sociable loners, and Hyunmee Lee is one of
the most driven, hard-working artists I know. Her work is both a retreat from the world and a
busy engagement in it. Of necessity the painter’s studio is a solitary space, but in a
metaphysical sense it is never unpopulated. Every time the process of artmaking is restarted,
the space is activated by the personas of different ideas, thoughts and memories, all of which
add pressure and variety to the movement of the artist’s brush. In much the same way as a writer at the keyboard might converse mentally with a perceived reader, for an artist like Lee
the process of painting is a silent dialogue with another presence: the eventual viewer who
completes the creative cycle. Like the signatures that scroll so gently across her work, the
compositions themselves are a calligraphic narrative abstracted to the point of grace. With a
syntax of half-remembered shapes or partial signs at her disposal, her art is a dialectical
engagement with the poetics of a practice that straddles multiple opposites: East and West,
spirit and matter, tradition and innovation.
Intimacy, with all of its connotations of trust, is a term that has often been used to describe
the tactile immediacy of Lee’s gestural abstraction. But for all its apparent ease and
seduction, the meditativeness that is the abiding mood in her art is borne out of years of
personal discipline—a rigorous “emptying out,” or dissociation of the mind, aimed at
facilitating a pictorial engagement that hovers beyond (or perhaps before) other, more
functional realms of language. In my own memories of the artist at work, the physical
demands and mental challenges she placed on herself certainly come to the fore.
Though it was many years ago, I vividly recall the perplexities and awkward silences when
Hyunmee Lee and I first tried to engage together with her work. Heightening our mutual
reticence was the competitive college environment we were both in, an intensive, selfanalytical
program of studio research that put great store on the language of critical
discussion. Contemporary art colleges can be tough places for reserved people—especially so
for international students trying to bridge cultural divides. Our first conversations in her
studio were a hesitant, stop-start affair: like two figures in the dark we stumbled about for the
words that seemed most apposite to her task. But tenacity is one of Lee’s distinguishing traits,
and neither of us gave up on each other. Prompted by the large, ambitious paintings that even
then proliferated around her, we spoke of many different frameworks of abstraction—both
Eastern and Western—before recognizing that we shared a common intuition about art. What
unified our separate perspectives, then as now, was our belief in the transcending capacity of
art as felt experience. Context alone never seems enough to explain the affective qualities of
a work of art, and silence can be of the most powerful responses that art can elicit. For me,
the pauses between our words were the openings that gave me access to Hyunmee Lee’s
painting.
From the beginning what struck me about her work was its commanding presence and selfassurance.
Her output was quite physical. Rather beguilingly, her paintings were of an
expansive scale that contrasted with her own delicate, diminutive stature. As exercises in
gestural abstraction, the elusive, almost self-concealing content of her compositions masked a
genuine technical facility, evident in the confident handling of the malleable, viscous surfaces
of her work. Often reliant on dominant, thick gestures of black, her paintings were almost
monochrome in effect: low-key without being cool, emotive but never flash. They seemed to
eschew color, yet beneath the scumbled surfaces were changing hues and splinters of light,
the pentimenti of earlier layers of activity. Evoking things that were never quite there, the
Oriental pictographs and other visual cues in her work alluded to an unseen level of
interiority. As in the art of Cy Twombly and many other modern painters similarly fascinated
by layered walls and ciphers, Lee’s thick impastos supported a fine écriture, a skein of
inscriptions reminiscent of automatic writing. In Lee’s case though, this markmaking had the
authenticity of a hand trained in the rigors of Asian calligraphy.
Trying to read Lee’s work from my own vantage point in Western art, I was struck by the
links between her painterly vision and the rich seam of modernism that extends from the 19th
century romantic sublime into 20th century transcendental abstraction. Certainly Lee was
aware of the significant benchmarks within that artistic lineage—our studio talks ranged from
Kandinsky’s “inner necessity” to the liquid blacks of Pierre Soulages, and on through the
whole postwar generation in American art. Without underestimating the importance of that
history for her, it was obvious that her painting sought its strength from a different
authority—a stylistic sensibility steeped in Korean values. Coming from a North Asian
industrialized society that is fully part of the global economy, Lee’s awareness of
international modernity has always been highly refined, but behind her cosmopolitanism lies
a much deeper communal relationship to Asia’s ancient philosophical roots. In Taoism,
Buddhism and Confucianism one can find the concepts that are truly significant to her
practice. Lee also had an important connection to one of the significant trends in postwar
Korean painting— the Monochrome movement founded in the 1970s, whose key exponent is
the painter Park Seo Bo. He had been Lee’s first and most important artistic mentor in Seoul,
and it is a reflection of her close allegiance to him that Korea’s foremost abstractionist has
been acknowledged in the writings that have come out of Lee’s American exhibitions.
One of the qualities that attracted me to Lee’s Korean inheritance was the way she viewed
her individual responsibility in the studio. Her demeanor attested to the humility that is the
Asian precondition for art. As Lee said in Salt Lake City in 2006: “All [my] paintings are
very connected to exploring myself … I am honest with my work, and once I’m finished,
those paintings can be my teacher.”1 If the artist is an apprentice of her own painting, the
practice itself requires a constant attitude of self-examination and correction. Looking back
over some of the statements Lee recorded in her Sydney notebook—which have since
reappeared in several catalogues—I have often paused over one entry that poignantly
describes the self-isolating situation of the painter seriously alone with her art:
I have been searching for myself for a long time. I always think of myself as part
of the world,
but never wholly belonging to it. “Everything becomes nothing.” I
know that is impossible to
achieve. I am exercising to get freedom from my body
and mind by gesture. (1990)
In the West we might be tempted to link such remarks to an almost autistic state of
individuation, a separation of the self from the ambient social world. But like a religious
ascetic in spiritual retreat, Lee was looking for ways to pass beyond her actual constraints
into a state of free consciousness where gesture finds its own autonomy. Far from being a
nihilistic form of withdrawal, her search for a reductive, meditative visual practice was
founded on a belief in liberating transcendence. The catalogue essayist Jim Edwards has
recently compared Lee’s sensibility to a statement her teacher Park Seo Bo made in 1977:
“My biggest interest is to live by pure action for nothingness. Like memorizing a chant or
meditating, entering a transcendent state through repetition, or repeating the act of emptying
myself.”2 Contemplating the void may be an aspiration towards the sublime, but it carries the
profound risk of loss. Confronted by this dilemma, the creative consciousness might
equivocate back and forth, a conflict that it tries to resolve by yearning for completeness. In Lee’s case, this was expressed in her desire for a pre-conscious sense of self. In the words of
a quotation that inspired the title of her 1990 exhibition First Face:
When your mind is not dwelling on good or evil,
What is the original face before you were born?
Lee’s thought about origins was equally a quest for the life force within. A recurring point of
reference in her studio conversations was the Taoist idea of ch’i, the ethereal “breath” or
“force” that is the animating power passing through all matter. For Lee, this is both the
catalytic flux and the oxygen her artwork needs. As the artist has written: “Without ch’i I
cannot breathe. Without ch’i, my painting cannot live.” While this Eastern idea of an implicit
energy flow has more balance than similar vitalist notions in Western philosophy, one can
appreciate its importance for Lee’s art by comparing it to the European avant-garde’s
embrace of the élan vital spoken of by Henri Bergson. Like his ideas of intuition, duration
and consciousness, Bergson’s theories of a creative, vital impetus profoundly influenced the
non-linear simultaneism and rhythms that helped to free modern painting from the static
window of representation.
Comparing Lee’s early thoughts in Australia to the themes she has explored in the United
States, it is possible to discern in her shift of national context a renewed interest in the
sublime. Since her arrival in America this has been given stronger expression by her exposure
to the pictorial traditions of the American landscape, but especially by her actual location in
the dry, open atmosphere and rocky spaces of the American West—an environment so
different from the humid coastal zones she had lived in before. In 2001-2002 Lee worked on
a series that became known as Mountain Armatures—her most conventionally
representational phase to date. Exhibited at Orem in Utah in 2002, Mountain Armatures had a
black, almost apocalyptic quality. Knowing the changes that had happened in her life, these
works to me spoke of her personal struggle to overcome dislocation. I therefore felt they were
a critical psychological moment for the artist. The gaunt, vertical profiles of desert mesas
were recorded by her in sketches, then transformed in her paintings into thick rigs and ravines
of paint; time-ravaged structures that seem to survive like sentries in nature. These prehuman,
architectonic constructions were like mysterious gateways into a sublimely different
nature: an archetypal, monumental America. The act of reinscribing these geological portals
therefore became a rite of passage that helped to hybridize her Oriental identity into this new
structure.
It is evident from the above that Hyunmee Lee has not shied away from absolutes, or the epic
implications of her themes. The curator Frank McEntire noted this when writing about her
Creation series, which he presented to the public in the exhibition Chunji-Chanjo (Heaven
and Earth), at Utah State University in 2005. On that occasion McEntire likened Lee’s whole
oeuvre since 1986 to “one continuous visual poem with stanzas marked by different year
cycles and titles: The Metaphysics of Being (1986-88); First Face (1989-92); Objecthood-
Intrinsic Space (1993-95); Seeing Through the Self (1997-98); Empathy Through the Window
(1998-2001); and Mountain Armatures (2001-02).”3
Intimacy without Restraint, an exhibition that was again curated by McEntire and shown in
the Great Hall of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in 2006, marked a new plateau of
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achievement for Hyunmee Lee. This exhibition juxtaposed a suite of her typically large
works with several grid-like matrices of one-foot square paintings, each of which was a
composition complete in itself. Titled Forces of Nature, the 120 small works that were
geometrically grouped together in the show were, as Edwards has noted, “counterpoints in
the balance between action and rest.”4 The large compositions in Intimacy without Restraint
belonged to the series Outside Sight, which according to the artist referred to the Asian
esthetic of “bringing the outside in to the centered self.”5 This she contrasted to Western
romanticism’s projection of the self outwards into nature. Like Mountain Armatures, Lee’s
Outside Sight demonstrated her ongoing engagement with the East-West dialectics of
representation. Intimacy without Restraint also saw the artist change towards a quieter, more
reflective mood. She said at the time that her new paintings were “subtler, calmer and more
meditative than her previous works.”6
What then, of the large square paintings that Hyunmee Lee has been producing in 2008? My
own impression is that they are the most liberated, air-filled works she has ever done. The
new work has been developed into several concurrent series, with titles that are juxtapositions
within themselves, such as Inland Island, Contact-Sensation, and Appearing-Disappearing.
With their open planes of luminous yellow, the Inland Island series lifts the extended
metaphor of Lee’s personal journey to a more vibrant and lyrical level. The subject further
alludes to her current physical environment, but now there is a life-enabling purity and
lightness of touch that contrasts remarkably with the heavily grounded Mountain Armatures
of six years before. The contradictory space of the dry desert sea is not set in time. Instead it
is energized by a very real presence—the powerful blacks that read like close-up fragments
of larger calligraphic forms. Other, more fugitive lines seek out the contours of a floating
array of shapes—a lexicon of arcs, triangles and lozenges, into which one might read the
hulls, fins or rudders of vessels and natural marine organisms. A potent archetype in its own
right, the vessel, or ark, is an apt metaphor for the buoyant, arching fluidity of Lee’s present
painterly style. It matters little if the imaginary vessel’s final resting point is unknown, for it
is in the actual voyage—the movement of the body into the liquid substance of the gesture—
that the image finds its full expression.
Courtney Davis, an art historian and colleague of the artist, has beautifully evoked the
sensual lyricism of Hyunmee Lee’s new paintings. In reference to works with titles like
Dimensional Poetics, Davis builds a word-picture that delightfully affirms an unexpected
lesson to be had from the spectator’s immersion in the image:
Rich forms advance from buttery canvases like an abstract garden. Gauzy veils
of paint hover
like soft air against the ebony weight of matter. Light peeks
through translucent shapes like
sunlight illuminating soft mist. Texture swirls
and echoes across the canvas as if carved by
waves or eroded by the wind. The
viewer, invited into a realm of contemplation and meditation,
is surprised to look
away and see the physical world existing in only three dimensions. But
perhaps
that is precisely the experience the artist would like the viewer to have.7
The empathetic, insightful quality of Davis’s writing highlights the gift that is being
exchanged in the viewing experience—the joy of a subliminal, oceanic movement into a
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space that is indeed a “realm.” In her compassionate embrace of opposites, Lee has
succeeded in synthesizing a union of esthetic experiences that is free unto itself. As Davis
puts it, her gestures “open a dimension outside of the physical world, a place of meditation
where judgment is suspended.”8
Dr Bruce Adams is the author of
Rustic Cubism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press:
2004). He was a supervisor of
Hyunmee Lee’s postgraduate
studies at the Sydney College of
the Arts in Sydney, New South
Wales, Australia.
Intimacy without Restraint: the Gesture Paintings of Hyunmee Lee
Life is about discovering our own identity. – Hyunmee Lee
Confronting the paintings of Hyunmee Lee, what impresses is their celebration of gesture and depiction of a nearly unlimited sense of space. Abstract and intuitively painterly, her aesthetic is one of immediacy perpetually seeking its own nature. Her marks as gesture, either as broadly applied brush strokes or swiftly rendered lines applied with an oil stick or a china marker, weave in and out of amorphous fields of paint. Scale is important, and in her recent paintings, the square format of her canvases (either eight foot or one foot) suggests other than merely a window view into the seen world.
The legacy of Lee’s paintings incorporates ancient and modern forms of Asian calligraphy, 20th-century forms of abstraction, including European Art Informal or Tachism, American Abstract Expressionism and the Korean Monochrome movement. She studied calligraphy with her grandfather and by the age of five was deemed the best amongst her brothers and sisters. In Asian cultures, the study of calligraphy is considered an important part of ones education. It starts in childhood and often becomes a lifelong practice as an art form. The tools of calligraphy - the brush, ink, and paper - are basically the same as those used in traditional forms of Asian painting. In essence, calligraphy is an abstract art, judged as much for its beauty, grace, and energy, as for the single words or characters that the calligraphic ideogram signifies. Lee has acknowledged the importance of her early training in calligraphy and her respect for the Korean Ink painters, including Soe Se-Ok, whose significant calligraphic gesture was important to contemporary Korean artists.
It is important to make distinctions between the arts of contemporary calligraphy and contemporary abstract painting. There are formal resemblances, for instance, between the brush strokes of an Abstract Expressionist painting and the ink strokes of cursive “running grass” script of Asian calligraphy. The French abstract painter Pierre Soulages judged Japanese calligraphy solely for its formal beauty, and since he could not read or speak the language, had no understanding of the meaning of the ideograms, the traditions from which they evolved and the sounds the written characters represented. In Lee’s own study of European abstraction, she was drawn to Soulages’ Black paintings, impressed by the vital force of his abstract calligraphic gesture and the collision and harmony of his invented forms. In her study of the abstractions by Hans Hartung she noted how his powerful calligraphic brushstrokes activate and compress space.
Upon her return to Korea from Sydney in 1991, where she continued here study of Western painting, Lee quickly found herself immersed in the thriving contemporary art scene that had developed in Seoul. She began teaching at Hong-Ik University, joining her mentor Pak Seo-bo, one of the country’s most famous artists and a founding member of the Korean Monochrome movement of the 1970s. “The Monochrome Artists,” the critic Youngna Kim has written, “found their basis in Taoism, espousing an Eastern intellectualism and asserting that they were carrying on with the traditional East Asian paradigm and view of nature.” In his series of paintings titled Ecriture, Pak Seo-bo applied pigment to canvas and then completely covered the surface with pencil lines, so densely applied that his mediums ultimately became one. This became his process of unifying the self with nature, of seeking a transcendental state. In an article that he wrote in 1977 he asserted, “My biggest interest is to live by pure action for nothingness. Like memorizing a chant or meditating, entering a transcendent state through repetition, or repeating the act of emptying myself.” Pak Seo-bo’s statement is in sync with Lee’s, when she declares, “The repetition of making and erasing form is how I deconstruct the existing order to make formless space.”
It is their shared Buddhist concept of the vastness of nature, and their quest to find unification within that vastness, that connects Lee with Pak Seo-bo. While visiting Lee in her studio and home in Pleasant Grove, Utah, she made the interesting comment that the Asian view of nature is one of bringing the outside in to the centered self, while in the West, we tend to project the centered self outwards upon nature. She refers to this Asian view of self and nature as “outside sight.” The source of energy that connect the self with all things, including formlessness and nothingness, is known in Zen as Ch’i, a principal source that not only animates Lee’s paintings and drawings, but defines her sense of spiritual identity. She would agree with the American Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock, who, when asked how his painting referred to nature, famously responded, “I am nature.”
Lee’s recent paintings continue to explore gesture and space. The big 90-square inch paintings that are included in Intimacy without Restraint: the Gesture Paintings of Lee Lee, organized for the Utah Museum of Fine Arts by independent curator Frank McEntire, are complex in their monochromatic tones. Her fields of gray are rich in their variation, some shading to a blue or purple tone, others become almost silver. She has applied the areas of color with large paint brushes, freely laying in broad areas and often creating layers of color. The lines moving across the surface of her color fields are rapidly drawn with oil stick and china marker. They twist and loop in a continuous manner, nervously activating the more broadly swept fields of color. Swiftness of execution is important. The dry media of oil stick and china marker has the advantage of providing a continuous extension of her line, not possible with a brush, which would have to be continually dipped in paint in order to complete a line. In the spontaneous act of painting, it is as if Lee’s fields of color and drawn lines are making the shortest possible route between her mind and hand.
The many small paintings in this exhibition, all being one foot square, should not be thought of as studies. In spite of their diminutive scale and installed on the museum walls as groups, each has its own sense of identity, its own completeness. They are related to a previous group of similar-sized paintings, her series Fragments of Mountains: 90 Days of Improvisation. They are exercises in the balance between action and rest and like Robert Motherwell’s series of black and blue ink paintings on paper (from his 1965 series the Lyric Suite); create counterpoints between action and rest. In these works, as in her larger paintings, the swiftly rendered gesture shares a compositional field of color. The composition and space she explores in these paintings, just as in classical Chinese and Korean landscape painting and in contemporary abstraction, is an invented one. The invented space suggests expansiveness and can, from painting to painting, range in emotional tone from a state of agitation to one of meditative calmness. Her line as gesture, like her own signature, is wiry and boldly free in its movement.
Lee’s expression in the language of abstraction is not a withdrawal from the objective world, but an intense investigation of nature and the subjective self. She has profited by her study of painting in Asia and the Western world, and she has reached a level of maturity in her own painting that will continue to be enriched in the future. For Hyunmee Lee, painting is a process of continual renewal, a tactile and spiritual act of immediacy and intimacy.
Jim Edwards
Notes: Quotes from Youngna Kim and Pak Seo-bo were taken from the on-line paper Two Traditions: Monochrome Art of the 1970s and Minjung (People’s) Art of the 1980s, by Youngna Kim, Seoul National University. Comments by Lee were shared with Jim Edwards in a studio interview on December 9, 2005, or in e-mail that followed that studio visit.
Jim Edwards is the Curator of Exhibitions at the Salt Lake Art Center and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.
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