Sang Nam Lee

Selected Biography

He got a BFA. Hong Ik University, Seoul, Korea in 1978 and moved to New York in 1981

Selected Exhibition

He had several solo exhibitions including pkm trinity gallery Seoul 2008 and "Landscapic Algorithm", LIG Tower, Seoul, Korea 2006 and Group exhibition including "Invitation to Modern Art", Museum of Art, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea 2006.

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It has sometimes been thought that abstraction in art implies a devaluation of subject matter. On the contrary, the impulse toward abstraction is profoundly connected to an exacerbation of the importance of subject matter, though linked to a sense of doubt. Is the subject present or absent? Is the image empty or full? Is it anything more than a folie à deux, the mutual hallucination of an artist and a viewer?

These are the kinds of questions to which Sang Nam Lee’s paintings give rise, which is to say that they are abstract in the strong sense: not simply depictions of motifs that we recognize as those of abstraction, but rather investigations of the semantic significance of those motifs in the absence of any clear convention or consensus as to their significance. The critic and curator Maia Damianovic once wrote of Lee’s work as "a game played without a consensual agreement, accreditation, or rules" and therefore in equal measure both "tragic and cruel" and "playful and innocent." This is a point we will have occasion to return to later.

Lee’s paintings present their motifs—strangely familiar-seeing though unreadable glyphs set against blank fields sometimes minimally articulated by a Johns-like target—in an unusually upfront, graphic way. It’s almost as if they were pretending to be not quite paintings, but simply signs, display boards, though in a script and a language one might not happen to understand—or on the other hand, to be diagrams, possibly for machinery whose use is radically unclear. In either case, there is an evocation of some significance or function that would be clear and definite. Yet this significance or function is denied.

Barry Schwabsky_Art Critic