Keunmin Lee
"Awakening Boundaries" curated by Seungho Park
Park Seo-Bo Fondation, 26SQM, Seoul
Keunmin Lee’s works are not paintings; they are experiences retraced—afterimages of hallucination and internal flesh made visible. The irregular shapes of red masses quiver like scarred tissues in some works, and in another, disembodied eyes roam in the sea of body parts. His colors oscillate between the scarlet hues of blood and flesh and the cool tones of chill, in dialectic recording of the artist’s emotive temperatures. The images are intersections of energy of blood and flesh, pathological beauty, and coagulation of distilled emotions.
What his canvases reveal are residues of unbearable weight of the experience of mental suffering, left unnamed and un-diagnosed. The artist’s practice was sparked by his personal experience of mental illness, notably, the borderline personality disorder which caused severe hallucinations. Yet, rather than making his works into self-confessions of pain, Keunmin Lee stirs up the sensations impossible to represent by their visual symptoms.
Swerving between precision and abandon, Lee’s visual language transforms from fleshy detail to smeared abstraction, and to visual metaphor. The artist admits this stylistic fluidity aligns his art with the lineage of Art Brut or Outsider Art, however, Lee’s exploration does not remain a self-compassion of otherized patient but becomes an active field of generative transformation. Hallucinations, sufferings, and the fragmentations of identity are shown to be unpleasant yet beautiful, both familiar and strange. Transcribing his experiences into the most unique language of painting, Keunmin Lee opens up the space for the “emotions that have not been understood” and presents us with the image of mental truths that remain ungraspable through the language of control and categorization.
In Lee’s works, the imperfections in body and mind are not shown as deficiencies to be hidden away; they become mirrors of the existential depth and the most private, creative fuel for the artist. In this, his paintings serve as the process of healing for the artist as well as an aesthetic suggestion for the social healing. Giving voice to the surplus sensations banished to the boundaries of society, Keunmin Lee’s art becomes a manifesto for new aesthetics.
- Curator Seungho Park