VISUAL ART BY TAEDONG LEE

A Phantom Place

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STATEMENT:

I work with the motif of memories and emotions about scenery. The emotional response to a place is maximized by visiting and staying in a particular place, as well as the emotional state of the time, and perceiving the elements of the space through the five senses. For example, imagine I was in a particular space. Grass leaves in the dense forest, snow-covered trees and lakes, and even temperature and humidity surrounding me communicate with "I" and amplify emotions again. My works begin by recording this perceived information in photographs or writings.

The work process starts with sitting in front of a canvas, appreciating the archives and reminding myself of the sight, touch, smell, and hearing of the time when I existed. It is more than just recalling the memory, and it is conveying the expanded elements, which helps me remind the emotions I have felt to the canvas. The landscape elements that have become so intense through this process, the shape of the landscape is gradually distorted through memory and reinterpreted into a new space with various colour, harmony, and techniques that I use to express my own fundamental feelings.

Recently, beyond the space and time frame of a single point of view and  place, I’ve been drawing current experiences with past memories, capturing  them together. I call this space on a canvas as “the archive of memories and emotions.” In other words, from the past when I started painting, to the elements of memory newly influenced by other media (photographs or images), the internal emotions of the present moment are stacked in collage form. The main point is the process of combining the current new self-influenced by various media into a new space created from the past. Eventually, the space is reconstructed into “A Phantom Place," which has existed but now does not exist.

Taedong Lee works with the motifs of memory and emotions related to landscape, which was either visited, seen in a picture, or in media. Lee transforms classical scenes of nature with a distorted shape of the landscape through a combination of impasto, thin layers of paint, and vivid colours.