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The life we stay, see, and expertise round us is, based on Sigmund Freud, solely the tip of the iceberg of consciousness. Our emotions, motives, and selections are, actually, influenced by the unconscious thoughts as the first supply of human habits. Not possible to achieve purposely and guarded by varied protection mechanisms (corresponding to repression or denial), this a part of the iceberg is revealed solely in tongue slips and thru goals. And for Sojeong Lee, documenting these flashes of unconsciousness grew to become a pivotal facet of her creative observe.
Artwork is commonly used as a way to convey feelings and concepts past what’s attainable with widespread verbal communication. It is usually a manner to assist take care of sure features of life and perceive one’s place inside a higher complete. So, for South Korean artist dwelling and dealing in Düsseldorf, this particularity formulated the primary ideas that her creative observe revolved round. And based on famend theories of dream perform – the ideas, photos, and sensations occurring in an individual’s thoughts throughout sleep may need an analogous function. Whether or not enabling to course of trauma, offering simulative coaching in coping with threats, or serving to and selling the training course of, they reveal issues which can be unimaginable to note awake or by way of acutely aware remark. And this specific realization prompted Lee to change her general observe and the whole oeuvre into a visible diary of the unconscious. Documenting her personal goals and nightmares, most of them scary and involving working away or flying on a paper airplane for expensive life (and all the time succeeding), she went manner past forming a language to talk of her emotional states, the solitude, alienation, or strangeness.
Strongly influenced by omnipresent manga aesthetics whereas rising up, it was the concept of constructing comics that sparked her preliminary curiosity in inventive expression. However whereas the time period “manga” is nearly synonymous with “cute” or “cartoonish” within the Western world, it was its means to seize and convey emotion, stress, and depth that Lee was primarily taken with. By abstracting the signature huge eyes and portray empty circles of their place, the protagonists grew to become extra ambiguous and stripped of any character traits. Along with blushing purple cheeks on an in any other case pale physique (to some extent referring to the widespread custom of beautifying the deceased), the imagery obtained eliminated additional away from childhood innocence and positioned within the realm of esoterism.
Combining such an strategy with a deep appreciation for painterly custom, and an virtually conservative outlook on figure-based, narrative oil portray, Lee developed a refined mix of two worlds by way of which she’s deciphering and sharing her ideas and goals. Having fun with the method from the second of laying down the primary layer of gesso on a uncooked canvas floor, the principle purpose is to constantly paint and create visible proofs of the aforementioned theories of dream perform. So shrouded throughout the passages of vibrant, tantalizing oil hues are weird and surreal characters and occasions, metaphors of non-public fears and realizations. They repeatedly carry a touch of Miriam Cahn’s horror, uncertainty, and stress, Ruprecht von Kaufmann’s emphasis on telling darkish, deeply private tales whereas additionally suggesting the common expertise, or parts of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s peculiar manner of constructing “drawings in coloured paint.” Pictures skilled in her sleep as hallucinatory motion pictures are reworked into cryptic snapshots stuffed with personally essential symbolism – a volcano signifying an emotional change, smoke indicating wandering away, headphones suggesting escape, the paper airplane being a flimsy technique of getaway, and the nets alluding to Lee’s ongoing quest to seize these visions. A few of them sourced from preconsciousness, and others, extra traumatic and highly effective unfavourable ones, from additional beneath the floor of consciousness. And simply because the purpose of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious acutely aware, Lee’s purpose is to deep-dive into the Iceberg Principle and make the envisioned seen. —Saša Bogojev
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