Large paintings by Sang Nam Lee turn something into nothing

Artist Sang Nam Lee poses in front of his painting ″The Fortress of Sense (L 127)″ (2015) at PKM Gallery in central Seoul. [MOON SO-YOUNG]

The large-scale paintings by artist Sang Nam Lee, now on view at PKM Gallery in central Seoul, are not easy to categorize. The paintings have geometric images reminiscent of the iconography of the machine civilization and are covered with lyrical pastel shades of pink, green, yellow and more.

“All the images in my paintings are icons and signs left by old and new human civilizations, which I found in both museums and my everyday life,” the 69-year-old artist told the press in a preview of his solo show “Sang Nam Lee: The Fortress of Sense” at the gallery last month. The exhibition runs through Saturday.

Asked whether he combines the images of the icons and signs to produce a certain meaning, Lee said, "No, I rather try to erase their original meanings and let them remain as a sort of noise in my paintings. It is difficult to make a meaningless image out of symbolic images. For my paintings, I chew on the graphics of the icons and symbols."

Lee's paintings, then, are like “abstract landscapes” of human civilization in an era of overflowing information, images and signs, Park Kyung-mee, founder and head of PKM Gallery, explained. “You will come to feel the paradoxical silence generated by the maximal noise.”

The exhibition features about 20 pieces of large-scale paintings by Lee, including those created in recent years.

“In this exhibition, Sang Nam Lee presents undisclosed new works with an expanded pool of colors and a deeper sense of perspective,” the gallery said in a press release. “The senses accumulated inside the artist for more than 40 years have consistently encountered the confined materiality of a canvas or wood panel, resulting in an explosive actualization.

“His abstract paintings, which are produced by the process of repainting and sanding down fifty to one hundred times, reflect our lives in the 21st century where digital and analog coexist,” the gallery added.

Born in Seoul in 1953, Lee graduated from Hongik University in 1978 with a major in painting, and has been working in New York since 1981. Lee has held more than 20 solo shows such as those at Elga Wimmer Gallery in New York and Galerie Åpert in Amsterdam, and participated in many group exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Korea, Seoul National University Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution in Washington and others.

BY MOON SO-YOUNG [moon.soyoung@joongang.co.kr]