EUN LEE | 이은 – Gallery Huue

EUN LEE | 이은

A low movement comes up to the surface. Thin blue lights situated among small pieces of time are like old memories imbued with the sea. Memories melt into the blue lights and go into hiding before suddenly appearing again as if trying to say something.

Artist Lee Eun’s seventh solo show titled The Sea brings together pieces of time when consciousness flows, following the blue light filtering into the gaps between memories and fragmentary thoughts are sensed at some point. The Sea series is a representation of the flow of the feeling reproduced in the gap of her childhood memories using a repetitive structure and serene yet dynamic movements. This series addresses an individual’s specific memories and an unconscious layer of the senses through an incomplete process but as a completed one or a repetitive unit.

This exhibition demonstrates stories of light, words, and sound deriving from The Sea series. The motifs and forms she chooses are tools to call to mind private emotions and memories as well as a passageway of the senses to uncover memories hidden behind time. Her individual memories and narratives die away beneath the surface of meaning, leaving behind uncertain symbols reminiscent of subtle emotions and senses after going through a phase of visual and tactile reconstruction through which overlapped time and dispersed meanings are linked together in different rhythms.

The Memory series in which clay pieces have been added to a canvas covered in white slip appears as shards of memories redolent of the link between the senses. The Stars Twinkle, an installation work of 100 ceramic plates in which dried clay is broken and scattered about a circular plate, conveys a poem that goes beyond the tales of 100 heavens and stars or the tales of 1000 seas and isles as if reciting it in a serene atmosphere. A constellation in the southern sky informs us of the season, we can find our way by means of the stars, and naming our own stars among a myriad of stars seem to fall in between words and meanings necessary for our whole lives.

A nightscape in which the shadows under white moonlight are cast in blue light is recollected. The night, the moon, and the shadows filter into and reflect one another. They are whole pieces completed after they are contained in one another, not form. Lee’s blue light looks more like the shadow under the sun than under the moon.

I met Lee Eun on the last Friday of November last year. Our conversation began with us saying that nothing had come out yet. She captured and continued with one piece. My memory of the event is not vivid enough to remember whether everything was one or could be seen as one, but her way of speaking, her way of selecting which words she would say and talking in a low voice, resembled her work that is said to be one piece. What we talked about in terms of pieces has extended to autumn following early winter, spring, and summer. I recalled that which Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine short-story writer and poet, left behind at the age of 80 when I heard her begin to speak: “There is no beginning and end...”

“I see two tips. And those tips are the beginning of a poem, the beginning of a fable, and the end. And that’s that. And I have to invent, I have to manufacture, what comes in between. That is left to me. What the muse, or the Holy Ghost, to use a finer and a darker name, gives me is the end and beginning of a story or of a poem. And then I have to fill it in.”

- Excerpts from Borges at Eighty: Conversations, an interview with Willis Barnstone