Red Scene 2021

Anh Thuy Nguyen

Since 2017, artist Jihyun Lee has made a significant shift in her 20-year-painting career. This new series of works breaks with the decadent time-space conundrums of Lee’s previous work and introduces a rupture of intimate domestic moments. Red Scene 2021, named after her first attempt in this series, is a curatorial project highlighting Lee’s best formal achievements to date. Through wall sculptures, works on paper and large-scale oil paintings, the exhibition attempts to honor Lee’s vision, which is as experimental as it is polished, as spirited as it is thoughtful.

The recurring image of this exhibition is Lee’s stuffed watercolor dolls, which physically rest on wooden shelves in the exhibition space. They are varied in scale, some as small as the palm of a hand, with the color of their hand-sewn threads exposed and their facial features smudged and drooled, expressing a sense of melancholy despite their innocent impression. These dolls are as personal as they look, inspired by Lee's memories of the early childhood toys her mother made for her in Seoul, and incorporating her own son’s drawings of imaginary faces and characters. While some of the dolls are anatomically correct, others are just “parts” or parts combined into “scenes” where mismatched heads and limbs are sewn together to create awkward forms. Some of these “parts” are even usable objects - for example, a stuffed head that is also a pin cushion with needles pinned on top. The doll shelf extends Lee’s long-time interest in the relationship between paintings and objects, where objects are made with formal, painterly qualities in mind, yet rely on materials other than paint to convey their subject. Jumbled on top of one another, a mess of “parts” and “scenes” filling the wooden shelves, the dolls reflect the aspiration to recreate the past out of a present of discontinuous, broken forms.

Lee’s process emerges as integral to her project, especially in Lee’s recurring studies of the dolls’ faces, limbs, and torsos on paper. While some drawings remain sketches, and are perfectly praise-worthy as such, all of Lee’s studies in this exhibition reveal her ability as a skilled abstract expressionist. Soft-toned sweeps swiftly differentiate foreground and background, while obscuring underdrawn and written words, which in turn only intensify the drawings’ intrigue. Lines emerge and take precedence, forming playful patterns and suggesting human shapes. The distance between strokes and lines, between painting and drawing, seems obliterated, as Lee constantly switches between the two, disregarding the expected hierarchy of their formal significance. Intending merely to capture fleeting thoughts for putatively more polished work, Lee produces instead a complete set of rhythms, at once organic and composed, evincing a mastery of material within the raw instinct of her working mind.

Following the concept of one of her first paintings in the series Red Scene_ Avon (2015), which depicts a family gathering, Red Scene_Cage (2020) carries on Lee’s nostalgic red theme. However, by shifting the choice of what is represented from human figures to her “doll-objects,” Lee transforms the subject, which was originally a realist scene, into an imaginative space where the dolls assume an emotive sentience. In the world of Lee’s canvas, the dolls are elevated beyond their initial conception as merely anthropomorphic objects. In other words, their emotion is no longer “painted-on” but feels real and tangible. Their loopy forms lean off a round steel cage illuminated at golden hour, filling the space with elliptical holes of reflected light and penumbra. The surreal geometry of light in the air throws subtle cinematographic movement onto the doll’s bodies, which appear used and desolate. While the painting’s red tone is based on the polished surface of an actual red cabinet in her mother’s kitchen, the painting escapes this personal frame of reference and becomes an elusive frame of mind, caught between a treasured everyday familiarity and a strange, tantalizing sadness. An engulfing canvas of 8 ft., Red Scene – Cage (2020) bespeaks Lee’s exceptional handling of light through which she conveys a genuine sentiment.

From afar, the magnification of everyday objects with bright clarity in Red Scene – Parts (2020) refers to American pop art painting since the 1960s. Upon a closer look, however, one sees how Lee quickly dissolves such clear-cut historical references with her expressive mark-making, abstract geometry, and consistent use of color as subject. While the crafting tools shown here are attractively portrayed, they remain secondary to the intense foreground which is a neatly arranged vertical row of detached round doll heads. Deepening the blend of muted tones and light pastels, the redness of this painting acquires force in the darkest moments of the scene that coincide with the happening-smudgeness of each doll face. These passages intensify the dolls’ expressions, leaving their physicality and their emotion obscure, as if one were only catching a glimpse of them in motion despite the stillness of the overall composition. Adding a subtle overlay of abstract reflections and a scattering of unfinished limbs, the painting begs the viewer to differentiate the real from the represented, and to question whether this scene is a captured everyday moment, or more hauntingly a projection of the subconscious and the imagined.

It is hard to fully unpack the success of Lee’s work within the context of art today. Some may simply find satisfaction in her vibrant canvases. Some may admire her mastery of composition and materials, while others may applaud Lee’s ambition for consistently tackling works of a certain scale and number. As much as I am tempted to highlight Lee as a woman artist, an immigrant, and a mother, it is important to stress that none of these conditions is responsible for her success. Lee’s works are quintessentially intuitive, unclouded by any preconceived notions of social identity or struggle. A certain nostalgia persists, as does an escapist tendency, but the true reward of Lee’s work lies in her unfeigned delight in her medium. In her best work, Lee opens up a viewing experience that is as much about yearning as it is about joy and relief.

* This essay was written on the occasion of the proposal for creating Jihyun Lee’s solo exhibition: Red Scene 2021, curated by Anh Thuy Nguyen.