Shaped canvas & Black painting, Lee Jinju.

Lee Jinju was born in Busan in 1980. She received a BA and MA in Eastern painting from Hongik University, where she is currently a professor of Eastern painting.

She delicately depicts uncanny and strange scenes, objects, and landscapes she encounters in her daily life, applying the coloring techniques of Eastern painting. Lee’s ‘shaped canvas’, which represents time, space and perspective through three-dimensional painting, offers a way to delve into the intricacies of the numerous stories within a grand landscape. On the other hand, her ‘black painting’, which portrays body parts such as hands and faces emerging from the pitch-black darkness, presents fragmented subjects in a more eerie manner, showcasing them dramatically.

The details that emerge in Lee Jinju’s work goes beyond simply replicating the subject. They capture the artist’s gaze towards the subject and the attitude cultivated through extensive observation.

The paintings of Lee Jinju open up landscapes where memory and the unconscious, truth and fiction, and frozen time coexist. Every object and person that appears in her work contains the artist’s gaze, rejuvenating the memories in the process of encounter. Lee’s work begins with repetitive questions thrown in life. The tangible results of this internal exploration process, which originated from these continuous inquiries, are expressed through sharp and geometric, sometimes seemingly ordinary and minuscule objects that have been carefully dissected from the well-constructed framework of daily life and memory. One step further, the artist’s canvas becomes the intermediate zone where boundaries between life and death, underground and surface, day and night are transcended, and the overlapping layers of dense metaphor unravel and sustain a fragmented and shattered world. In this place, the movements of existence escape the dimensions of time and space, randomly infiltrating the crevices of memory throughout various spaces. To Lee, memory is constantly summoned by sensory stimuli. These sensory stimuli allow us to perceive the unseen dimensions more distinctly and serve as the essence of human instinct and the catalyst for artistic creation, capturing the elusive realm beyond tangible forms.

Lee’s early works explored the traumas that we experience repeatedly throughout our lives. Based on an inconvenient recollection, she creates scenes that contain many riddle-like narratives by restructuring remnants of time- or place-specific memories. Through the “shaped (non-rectangular) canvas” and “three-dimensional painting,” Lee also manipulates the canvas to serve not only as a physical backdrop but also a psychological barrier/divider.

Today, her work focuses on the question of what it is that we really see—not just physically-manifested, photographic scenes but also the subjective state in which an individual’s experiences, memories, and imaginings are perceived simultaneously. She depicts disparate events on the same canvas with, in some instances, a small part of the subject depicted in excessive detail. Through the painting’s composition and way in which it is installed in the exhibition venue, Lee suggests that our perspective of the world is distorted and that, due to inevitable blind spots, it is impossible for us to see anything “genuinely.”

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Видео Shaped canvas & Black painting, Lee Jinju. канала Art Warehouse