Tactile Landscape

After seeing Lee Kwang-Ho's new series of landscape paintings, the word "picturesque" floated around my head. Meaning literally "picture-like," the word was first used in 17th century Europe to describe an idealized aesthetic landscape, but it also implies a direct correlation between the picture and the landscape itself. In this respect, the tradition of landscape painting has resulted in a singular perspective wherein a viewer projects themselves into the landscape, internalizing an idealized version of nature as framed by their gaze and literally seeing the landscape as "like a picture."

The conditions of this historic negotiation berween the natural landscape, painting, and viewer sometimes obscure what we are looking at, begging the question: Is what I saw in the work of Lee Kwang Ho a landscape or a painting?

Lee's recent paintings depict lonely scenes of dense forests steeped in secrecy. Capturing the tangled bush of Gorjawal Forest on Jeju Island, the pictures at first glance clearly convey a real geographic place. However, upon closer inspection, the artist's smooth hand and deft brushstrokes, as well as his manipulation of the surface by adding and scraping its painted layers, all come into focus, redefining the picture clearly as a painting. The forest emerges as a uniquely tangible reality, not because of the clearly defined portrayal of species in the forest, but what the artist has created through his careful manipulation of the paint. What differentiates the paintings from a photograph is that the layers of paint and artistic interpretation are embedded in the process of exploring the mysterious world of the forest, thereby becoming the motif of the work. As the painting gets closer to the landscape, the landscape becomes the painting.

Lee Kwang-Ho is an artist who continuously explores the subject of painting. This ongoing commitment to investigation can be seen in his exhibition "The Art of Painting", as well as in his portrait series Inter-View, and his more recent still-life series Cactus, and it seems natural that his focus has now shifted to the subject of landscapes. A natural landscape connotes mystery of the unknown, a place different from urban space but simultaneously still the backdrop to one's everyday reality. A natural landscape is very similar to a painting whereas a painting is inevitably entirely different but never-the-less connected to the real. Perspective and the position of the viewer are fundamental elements in the definition of a "landscape." If one excludes viewpoints that exceed our physical limitations, for example a "bird's-eye view," a viewer's perspective must, by definition, exist within the landscape. This positioning establishes a deeper subjectivity than that of a still-life painting and is clearly manifest in objective distance.

A number of paintings in Lee Kwang-Ho's solo exhibition at Kukje Gallery in 2010, where the primary focus was on the Cactus series, hinted at his interest in landscape. This nascent interest became more pronounced at his solo exhibition at Gallery SoSo in 2012. While the Cactus series emphasized objective representation of the subject matter, it was clear that the landscape paintings exhibited at Gallery SoSo contained a greater window into the artist's personal feelings. Like a heat haze emitted from the forest, one could sense the artist's passion in their detail and exquisite line quality. It seemed Lee's new direction was being encouraged by his ability to explore an unfamiliar world, freed from the need to capture the perfection required by the Cactus. The most interesting thing was that in these early works it felt like the artist intimately engaged the subject without knowing it entirely, in contrast to the Cactus series, where it felt like he completely mastered it. In this respect, the title of the exhibition, "Caress", seems significant.

Lee's working process gradually builds the painting in stages, as if he is completing his self-assigned tasks one by one. His meticulous process is rooted in his conceptual investigations and has informed his work since he began exploring the subjects of illusion, representation and perspective-developing through his successive bodies of work. His oeuvre includes earlier works that explore his emotions by utilizing the context of iconography. For example, the series Inter-View investigates the experience of humanity by focusing on the figure, the Cactus series, on the other hand, explores the tradition of still-life and, most recently, the landscape. Although his unique discipline and craft have made this process possible, above all, what has inspired him as an artist is the question of whether it is possible to synchronize his painting techniques with the portrayal of reality?

The artist's commitment to closely studying his subject has been of paramount importance since the Inter-View series. In this work, objective elements like clothing and personal belongings act as visual signage to show the unique characteristics of the figure, in addition to the subject's gaze, facial expressions and subtle poses. If the viewer personally knows the depicted figures, he or she cannot help but sympathize with the furtive precision of Lee's artistic interpretation. This sensitive approach is key to understanding how the artist narrows the distance between what he sees and the objective reality that manifests itself through his painterly representation.

In the Cactus series, where his subject matter was found in nature and not the figure, Lee deals skillfully with the tension between the objective subject and subjective interpretation. The interpretation of the cactus as a sensual and zoomorphic subject is successful due to the artist's coral control and immersion in the object itself, as evidenced by his masterful ability to portray the highly unique plants in such detail. When the painted image becomes both the cactus and more than just the cactus, its manifestation is based on the weight of the brushstroke transformed into the weight of the subject.
When this happens the subject and the paint combine in what can be described as the density of the subject. It was at this point when the artist's desire for pictorial completeness joined with the sensuality of the cactus, that Lee Kwang Ho shifted his attention to the landscape outside, a shift that resulted in his giving himself a new assignment: the search for uncertainty.

The myriad unpredictable variables that make up a desolate forest require the artist to make countless decisions in order to capture it in paint. Deep in the woods, there is undeniably a subtle and profound atmosphere that is never definitive, it is a time and space bracketed by a combination of non-material factors like light, odor, air, wind and sound as well as the form and size of the trees and plants. Lee Kwang-Ho attempts in his work to frame this profoundly complex ecology, capturing the unpredictable and unknowable forest by caressing the infinitely minute parts of nature with his paint brush and joining them with the cqually tangled emotional textures that he experienced in their presence, like comfort, freedom, wonder, and fear. Through his process Lee's final depiction of the forest appears, at first glance, like a hyper-realistic representation, but a discerning viewer quickly realizes that it is a highly subjective portrayal of the landscape that reflects the artist's own physical experience.

When I first visited the artist's studio to see the works for this exhibition, the forest scenes seemed mostly conceptual in form. However, after more than six months, they evolved to become fully embodied "landscapes" wherein the textures of the forest are combined with the artist's subjective emotions in each brushstroke. The weight of Lee's material choices result in his sensual instincts manifested in paint, thereby showing the reality of the forest as it is, not the simple representation of a random location.
Indeed, the artist has done more than just capture the brilliant spirit of the woods on canvas, he has challenged his own expert painting techniques, approaching the work with vulnerability and facing the unknown dangers and sublime powers of wild nature. Perhaps their power comes from his mastery of how material can become its own subject. Indeed, the works of Lee Kwang-Ho could be described as the "point where painting becomes landscape." His paintings frame the intersection where the "facts" portrayed by pictorial representation meets the "truth" of the landscape created in a way that is only known to the artist.