Chunghyung Lee: The Site before Your Eyes
As a way to support himself as an artist, Chunghyung Lee has been doing work for hire doing gallery space design and construction and in the process has utilized unexpected artistic elements found in these building sites to create his own works of art. For his first solo exhibition, Lee combines the concepts of fine art and labor, or work, and aptly titles it Fine Works (2015), taking items found during construction, such as left over debris from carpentry work, paint cans, ladders, etc. and transforming them as objets d鈥檃rts of his art works. In Painter (2015) he took paint cans from a construction paint job and transported them to an art gallery to be installed as his art piece according to his will and direction, thus endowing them to have an artistic value. To Lee, the paint roller in a can is the artist鈥檚 brush and pallet, and he selects the ambiguous word 鈥榩ainter,鈥� referring to both a construction painter as well as an artist, as the appropriate title of his work. In addition, Lee takes objects found in building sites and presents them as abstract sculptures or paintings as demonstrated in A Great Finger (2015), where fingers of cotton work gloves are stretched as an installation piece, and Hall of Fame (2015), that recreates a thickened gallery wall that has acquired numerous layers of paint over time from hosting exhibits.
This exhibition of Lee鈥檚 called The Site before Your Eyes begins with the photographic series The Study of Crossing Area (2013-2016) which stems from contemplations about his life as an artist. Labor being an unavoidable necessity in sustaining the life of an individual, Lee too has had to build spaces for hire performing carpentry and paint jobs so that he will be able to continue creating artistic work. But then he is faced with the reality of his time becoming dominated by the role of a laborer and consequently finding it difficult to devote any time to his art. Reality breaks away from the ideal and it is in this discrepancy that Lee attempts to find the overlapping region between labor and art. Though not performed for his own exhibit work, the artists considers his gallery space building jobs for hire for museums, galleries, etc. as an extension of his art work, the 鈥榳ork鈥� being site planning and building labor as well as the process of completing an artistic piece. Lee鈥檚 new release The Site before Your Eyes (2016) is the on-going building grounds for both his wage-earing job and his solo exhibition, through which he studies the common areas of art and labor standing at the edge of their boundaries. By opening up the entire building site of his piece to the audience, he presents in a dynamic manner the precise moment and process where wage labor is transformed into an act of creativity, and enters the realms of art. In a separated room behind the gallery, a photographic archive of building sites taken from 2012 are presented in a report-like product, recording the aesthetic qualities of the photographs and at what point they were considered interesting. So as such, a 鈥渟ite鈥� to Lee is as much a place of construction as it is an exhibit space, and his attempts to define the overlapping area of these two is making real a life where reality and the ideal coexist, with him simultaneously being a laborer and an artist.
Lee's work uses physical and psychological labor as the means to achieve the ideals of an artist, and holds in it his enthusiasm to face labor and creative activities with the appropriate attitudes of an artist. By opening up the labor-sustained gallery space building site to an audience, Chunghyung Lee has attributed artistic value to it, through which he draws his long contemplated ideal 'The Site before Your Eyes' at the point of intersection of labor and art.
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As a way to support himself as an artist, Chunghyung Lee has been doing work for hire doing gallery space design and construction and in the process has utilized unexpected artistic elements found in these building sites to create his own works of art. For his first solo exhibition, Lee combines the concepts of fine art and labor, or work, and aptly titles it Fine Works (2015), taking items found during construction, such as left over debris from carpentry work, paint cans, ladders, etc. and transforming them as objets d鈥檃rts of his art works. In Painter (2015) he took paint cans from a construction paint job and transported them to an art gallery to be installed as his art piece according to his will and direction, thus endowing them to have an artistic value. To Lee, the paint roller in a can is the artist鈥檚 brush and pallet, and he selects the ambiguous word 鈥榩ainter,鈥� referring to both a construction painter as well as an artist, as the appropriate title of his work. In addition, Lee takes objects found in building sites and presents them as abstract sculptures or paintings as demonstrated in A Great Finger (2015), where fingers of cotton work gloves are stretched as an installation piece, and Hall of Fame (2015), that recreates a thickened gallery wall that has acquired numerous layers of paint over time from hosting exhibits.
This exhibition of Lee鈥檚 called The Site before Your Eyes begins with the photographic series The Study of Crossing Area (2013-2016) which stems from contemplations about his life as an artist. Labor being an unavoidable necessity in sustaining the life of an individual, Lee too has had to build spaces for hire performing carpentry and paint jobs so that he will be able to continue creating artistic work. But then he is faced with the reality of his time becoming dominated by the role of a laborer and consequently finding it difficult to devote any time to his art. Reality breaks away from the ideal and it is in this discrepancy that Lee attempts to find the overlapping region between labor and art. Though not performed for his own exhibit work, the artists considers his gallery space building jobs for hire for museums, galleries, etc. as an extension of his art work, the 鈥榳ork鈥� being site planning and building labor as well as the process of completing an artistic piece. Lee鈥檚 new release The Site before Your Eyes (2016) is the on-going building grounds for both his wage-earing job and his solo exhibition, through which he studies the common areas of art and labor standing at the edge of their boundaries. By opening up the entire building site of his piece to the audience, he presents in a dynamic manner the precise moment and process where wage labor is transformed into an act of creativity, and enters the realms of art. In a separated room behind the gallery, a photographic archive of building sites taken from 2012 are presented in a report-like product, recording the aesthetic qualities of the photographs and at what point they were considered interesting. So as such, a 鈥渟ite鈥� to Lee is as much a place of construction as it is an exhibit space, and his attempts to define the overlapping area of these two is making real a life where reality and the ideal coexist, with him simultaneously being a laborer and an artist.
Lee's work uses physical and psychological labor as the means to achieve the ideals of an artist, and holds in it his enthusiasm to face labor and creative activities with the appropriate attitudes of an artist. By opening up the labor-sustained gallery space building site to an audience, Chunghyung Lee has attributed artistic value to it, through which he draws his long contemplated ideal 'The Site before Your Eyes' at the point of intersection of labor and art.
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