LEE JINHAN | I EAT I VOMIT

About

Hada Contemporary is pleased to present the first UK solo exhibition by Lee Jinhan showcasing her new works. Lee Jinhan's expressive abstract paintings depart from the challenge between the Renaissance perspectives and abstract modernist paintings. Lee's joyful layers of painterly surfaces display both spontaneous fluidity with delicate moderation. She playfully sweeps across the canvas with diverse artistic medium such as oil paints, fluorescent spray paints and glitters with captivating colours to create the subtle disorientation between abstract and figuration and two dimension and three dimension bringing the continuous to-and-fro reaction within. By strategically merging two chronically different ideas of representation - Renaissance perspective representation as illusions of reality and flat Modernist abstract representation as an object of itself — she allows the disparate spaces and time to coexist on the surfaces creating linear relationships. The layers of paints cease to exist in their chronological order breaking the continuity of time and space allowing all to exist in one moment in time. Lee's most recent works displayed in this exhibition show her gradual development on her subject matter — from the abstract landscape to an open ended abstract environment incorporating figurative references from the popular culture as Korean pop music (K-Pop), internet cartoons and literatures. Especially in an age when the mass media plays a significant role in creating human consciousness, these uncontrollable amount of ephemeral representations and metaphors shown in contemporary culture are also one form of abstraction — as she comments on the K-pop industry and music in Electric Shock (2012) and NUABO (2012). The artist employs perplex yet wondrous images through literality to depict this abstractness embedded in the society and the language. In these, she toys with images, languages, contexts and their interdependent relationship analogous to the postmodernists' non-narrative play of detached signifiers in constructing a unique pictorial language. Yet, refraining from deconstructing the context and minimising her subjective influence she allows interpretive cues for the audience to decipher and to create the meaning at their perusal. Regardless of the original functional and the metaphorical meaning, in paintings as Volcano Duck and Three Moo Boxes (2011), she produces ambiguous and incongruent context through the literal conversion of the language into the image. The complex entanglement of the metaphorical contexts becomes blurred and the boundary between the sign, the signifier and the signified becomes obscured. Lee Jinhan (b.1982) lives and works in London, United Kingdom. She received MFA at Goldsmiths and Central Saint Martins, London after achieving BFA at Hongik University, Seoul. Lee has exhibited widely in UK and Korea. Most recently she has been shortlisted for Saatchi Gallery New Sensation 2012 and she has been selected as finalist for Gallery Loop Young Artist Competition 2011, Seoul, 33rd Joongang Fine Art Competition, Seoul and Guasch Conranty Prize 2010, Barcelona.