22–25 January 2015
Booth H2 – Main Hall
Art Stage Singapore
Marina Bay Sands
Sands Expo and Convention Centre – Level B2
10 Bayfront Avenue
Singapore 018956
T +34 625 06 76 71
hello [at] sabrinaamrani.com
www.sabrinaamrani.com
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Sabrina Amrani Gallery will participate in Art Stage Singapore for the first time with a solo presentation by South Korean-American artist Timothy Hyunsoo Lee, where the artist doubles himself as a multiplicity of ghost identities, transitions, and throughways.
In psychoanalytical theory, the concept of the “uncanny” refers to the cognitive dissonance of a strange doubleness; an instance of something which is both familiar and yet uncomfortably strange. At the sudden sight of this uncanny, the subject breaks down and doubles; It reacts with horror to the loss of distinction between subject and object, self and other.
The early experience of immigration and psychological disorder placed Lee in a privileged position of radical otherness. Using paper as his primary medium and metaphor, Lee’s world appears elastic and volatile, almost at a breaking point, yet mysteriously at rest.
The artist draws on his own traumatic experience of anxiety and panic disorders as a child, which then translated into his work as a site of reconstruction—the missed encounter with the real at the heart of trauma can only be explored through repetition and surveying. Expanding his psyche as an abstract territory, Lee maps out cartographies and topologies onto large-scale watercolors which operate as both surface and object. The traditional inertia of classical painting is abandoned for the sake of a sensorial experience engaging all manners of motion and bending, and splitting the gravity of space into an open field of impressions and traces. Beyond the rigid impositions of conceptual art, Lee turns away from reductionism, liberating expression from description.
His expressiveness however is not unbound but meticulous. The painted diamond-like cells, basic unit of his grammar, is a reference to the visual culture of cytohistology—the study of cells and tissues, which maps out mental illness not as a psycho-social condition but as a psycho-biological singularity. The works in the presentation, loyal to the topological nature of Lee’s practice are not a seamless units but a surface in constant growth.
In the large watercolors 296.35, 303.8, 301.4 (I) and 301.4 (II), from the 2014 series “Traces,” a polymorphous surface begins to appear, attesting to Lee’s engagement with the spirituality of Kandinsky, and the outreach for the “other self,” finding solace in the purity of color and line, and dwelling on his own double-entendre. It is a precarious threshold between moderation and madness.
In the most recent works from the 2014 series “Impressions,” Composition I, Composition II, and Gasp, Shit (Composition V), the artist has internalized his “other self” in order to create ever more complex structures, simultaneously abstract and intimate—an architecture of the mind.
“There’s no double without devouring,” writes Sarah Kofman, “without cutting into what, without it, might have passed for a full, self-sufficient presence. The double disfigures the original, disturbs the order between the real world and the presence of art: Art upsets the opposition between these two worlds, causes each to slip into the other.”
–Arie Amaya-Akkermans
Read more about Timothy Hyunsoo Lee here.
Download press release and high-resolution images here.
Preview Timothy Hyunsoo Lee’s work on Artsy.
For press inquires, please email hello [at] sabrinaamrani.com.
