Contributing Artists

  Stephany Lee

Exhibition Statement as Preserved in the SUGS/SITE Archives:

As a Korean-American living in America, Lee is inspired by Western contemporary culture and its fusion with her familial roots in Eastern traditions like Buddhism. Her works are heavily influenced by the twentieth century Korean monochrome movement, Dansaekhwa – which imbues Western minimalist ideas with Buddhist philosophy. She combines traditional Asian materials like hanji and muck – Korean paper made with mulberry and Korean charcoal ink respectively – with less common drawing materials like water. She calls upon drawing’s most fundamental structures through her focus on line and her process of mark-making. In her works, Lee emphasizes the rotation of day and night, light and dark, literally grounded by the constant horizon line.
The act of bringing together a Western approach in art and an Eastern spiritual understanding is significant to Lee’s practice. She is interested in echoing the oneness that can occur between seemingly disparate ideas. With her work, Lee aims to re-address the weight of the line on paper and its dividing consequences evident in contemporary global issues – like socio-political, ideological and geographical boundaries drawn between and within countries. Through her performances and ink on paper series, Lee subverts the use of lines by using it to remove boundaries.
The physical world is both defined and limited by human perception. What one understands as reality, is all but an illusion. In Eastern philosophy, there is a subtle line between life and death; it is merely a change in condition. While waves appear and disappear, the presence of water remains. The Horizon Line is the artist’s meditation of unification and oneness.
A word from the artist:
“With the ever changing forces that move through the physical world, I simply have to take the world as it is. Buddha said, ‘I teach that the multitudinousness of objects have no reality in themselves but are only seen of the mind and, therefore, are of a dream.’”