Nakyung Lee

NAKYUNG LEE: IMAGINARY LANDSCAPES

By Peter Frank

In painting, how can space exist without a picture to inhabit?  How is it we can see space in the most abstract of compositions?  Because in painting perception is not just visual, but somatic.  We feel what we see, and space becomes a matter not just of what is seen, or even what is known, but what is felt.  Lee Nakyung makes us feel space in her painting, even though it is still very obviously painting.  At the same time that Lee makes dramatic gestures with the brush, at the same time that she saturates colors into various sites around the canvas, at the same time that she places shapes suggestive of flowers or structures next to shapes that suggest only the application of pigment to surface, she arranges things so that form and atmosphere, however abstracted, combine to describe a space opening up behind and beyond the picture plane.  

Lee is involved not so much in the creation of visual illusion as in the creation of suggestion.  Her forms and colors infer the existence of space; even when their energy and vibrancy call attention to themselves, they behave as if they occupy an indistinctly defined but strongly sensed space, an enveloping room or sky.  What we feel, then, is that Lee’s paintings describe situations physically bigger than the things they contain; we don’t see it that way, but that’s how we understand it. 

The emphasis on fictive space being made in this discussion should be regarded as a way not only of focusing on a less apparent – but more pervasive – quality in Lee’s work, but of distinguishing her work from more entirely painterly, gestural work, the kind that insists on the factual “purity” of the picture plane.  Abstract expressionism, which made Lee’s painting – and so much other painting – possible, may have exploited the energy released when paint hits the canvas surface, but it did not insist that the binding of paint to surface was the only thing we could possibly “know” about such abstraction.  Besides investigating the mythic properties of the sign and the gesture, abstract expressionism also allowed for the expansion of optical sensation into the picture.  Whether motivated by surrealism’s dreamlike conjurations of infinite space or by Hans Hofmann’s push-pull theories, the abstract expressionists thought in terms of depth as well as breadth – providing Lee with her own lesson in the possibilities of abstract space.

Ironically, between Lee’s two current series of paintings, we feel space more readily in the more purely non-objective group.  In the paintings based on floral forms Lee relies more on decorative strategies and articulation of the painting surface, even while describing forms we recognize from the “real” world.  Lee does not paint those forms naturalistically, but as stylized motifs that suggest not flowers so much as the kinds of flower patterns found on utilitarian objects and craftware, especially those associated with the arts of Asia. Indeed, even the gritty, textured quality of the paint in these paintings conveys a strong association both with fabric and with woodcut printing.  The suggestion of space is not entirely eliminated here, but, especially given the tendency of the floral forms to interlink at least as much as to overlap, the spatial suggestion is restrained and subtle.  Sometimes it seems to disappear entirely behind a wall of exquisitely applied paint; but nuances in this delicately inflected ground serve to retain a subdued, sometimes ghostly, spatial sense.  

It’s in the more purely abstract work, with its often deep, brilliant color and frequently electric play of brittle edges and darting brushstrokes, that Lee’s embrace of space is most thorough.  The very energy of her forms here helps convince us that such powerful abstract choreography is playing out on a deep, deep stage, or perhaps outside with the universe as the backdrop.  That backdrop itself shatters as its blues bump up against earthy ochres and chlorophyll greens; space pushes forward and itself becomes a kind of figure. But it stays space just the same, able to encompass what’s going on even as it goes on. 

Nakyung Lee’s painting is first and foremost about the energy of paint and the multiple possibilities of picture-making in the early 21st century.  But central to this energy and to these possibilities is Lee’s ability to render space without describing it literally.  Lee’s painting is always painting, but it accepts our need for pictorial coherence, a need that takes place under an open sky, with things in the distance as well as directly in front of us.  Lee’s painting embraces space because it embraces sight

Los Angeles

March 2011