Hyunmee Lee

native mumbling : da da ga ga

[ july 15th - 31st, 2011 ]

Hyunmee Lee’s recent series of paintings, Native Mumbling: Da Da Ga Ga, is an exhibition that spans gestural abstraction with dominant and spontaneous markings. These markings are the deconstruction of Korean letters (hangul) with the layering of paper (hanji), a combination which allows Lee to expand into new territories of the imagination that investigates nature and the subjective self. The elements of Korean modernism, Asian classicism and Western abstraction are all brought to- gether with a unifying core. This core is the harmonious dance between the meditative process which is slow and deliberate and an opposing force of repetition and gesture which is paint- erly and spontaneous.

Using acrylics, painted Korean rice paper and mixed media on canvas, her Native Mumbling Series is confident and pure. The fields of white are rich in their variation, combining confident and intuitive lines and monochromatic spaces with bold accents of color. Some shading to earthly colored tones of swirling movement appear, which activate the surfaces into a new spatial realm. Featuring mostly large paintings in the exhibition, scale is important to Lee. The large paintings open as windows with a view into the beyond of real space.

A Korean-born abstract painter, Hyunmee Lee earned her BFA at Hong-Ik University in Seoul and MA and MFA in Visual Arts at the Sydney College of Arts, University of Sydney. She has been in America for fourteen years and currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, where Lee had achieved tenure as an Art Professor. Lee has had solo exhibitions in Utah Museum of Fine Arts in 2006 and Nora Harrison Museum of Art in 2004. Hyunmee Lee exhibits her work nationally and internationally with an extensive list of articles published.