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Lee Joong Hi: Painting the Invisible
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11805 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1994 |
1,958 Words |
| Author
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Betty Rogers Rubenstein
Betty Rogers Rubenstein is an art historian and critic
residing in Tallahassee, Florida. |
"So long as artistry exists, there is no need for theory or logic to direct the painter's action."
--Kandinsky1
The surge of creative talent in contemporary Korea has produced a wave of talented artists, and Lee Joong Hi is one of the most interesting painters yet to appear. His work is both within the Korean tradition and compelling to the Western eye.
For several years Lee has concentrated on three themes, producing a series of paintings on each: Spirit Dance, Mandala, and Danchung. These works, with their electric colors and whirling rhythms, wipe aside any prior barriers to Oriental art and plunge the viewer into the deepest level of Korean culture. Spirit Dance refers to the shaman's ecstatic, ceremonial appeal to the spirits for harmony. Mandala, a formal diagram of the cosmos presided over by a spiritual Buddha, is translated into paint by Lee with much the same gusto and color intensity as his Spirit Dance works. When I asked Lee in a recent interview the meaning of Danchung, he said wistfully, "It refers to the 'throne' of the emperor. Today, of course, it is empty."
These paintings are both nostalgic and existential for Lee, who, as a Unificationist, considers himself a Christian. They are born partly out of Lee's early childhood, when his mother took him to shamanist rituals. Like every Korean, he also knows well the colorful Buddhist temples routinely decorated in the same brilliant colors he uses in these three series. Shamanism is still the foundation of the Korean worldview, the mother religion of all the scholarly refined religions that have come into Korea.2 Influences from Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism collided with shamanism in the past, as currently Christianity and Islam are doing. But the mass culture is still rooted in the animistic elements of shamanism. Spirits of earth, water, and sky--with their messengers--are still integral to Korean consciousness, a consciousness that understands, profoundly, both current environmental concerns and the dangers of modernization.
Connecting Two Worlds
In his Spirit Dance series, Lee evokes the shamanist kut ceremony. This ceremony summons forth the invisible spirits of the upper and lower worlds for multiple yet related reasons: to promote harmony, to heal, to bring messages to the living, or to appease the dead. To achieve this purpose, a shaman (mudang in Korean), who can
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