Keunmin Lee: Trace the Empty Space

About

Keunmin’s fluid, graphite lines angle and cull curious figures from the depths of his consciousness, banding an exotic amalgamation of life onto the blank page. Collectively, his idiosyncratic outlines caricature the curio cabinet of our innermost anxieties.

Trace the Empty Space hinges on the surreal with its curious composition of humanoid subjects intimating proclivities that are not totally foreign to the human experience. The pathetic intensity imbued in these two-dimensional characters is enacted in their varying postures, disclosing an undercurrent of chronic disquiet. Keunmin’s frenetic smudges, partial erasures, and intentionally interrupted beings reflect an innate mastery for delineating imprecise figures of a psychological medium. The complexity of his subjects is elicited in their incongruous shapes, maintaining several identities upon the static page.

Keunmin’s figures range in their distinctive deformities, but still preserve a dignified charisma that suggests their misshapenness is a fault purely perceived by our self-conscious estimation, an act of “othering” our own self-identified flaws. However, in recognizing these mirror imperfections, there is compassion and hope to be found. Keunmin strips the clean veneer of composure and exposes our mutual vulnerabilities and insecurities in his coarse renderings, not out of spite or for shaming, but in an earnest attempt to forge reconciliation between others and within ourselves.

The ultimate duality of Empty Scene is conveyed in its liminal potential to be realized as both absurd and genuine. Keunmin is simply tracing what has always existed and commits it to the light of the page.