In Despair, and Finding.

The experience of global disasters and wars are often encountered through press media such as newspapers or television broadcasting. Experiencing such extreme realities of our time through a virtual tool fogs the receiver¡¯s sense of reality. A similar kind of loss of truth exists in art as well. As if wrapped in an invisible layer of film that fixes it into another worldly dimension, art sometimes becomes no more than an object of observation. Yujin Lee focuses on explosions amongst many precariously drifting images in today¡¯s media world. She emphasizes an empty moment of despair by interpreting the image somewhere in between reality and aeriality, truth and phantom. At the same time, she also successfully distills the image into the realm of art by capturing the visual grandiose of a smoke through the medium of drawing.

Following a thundering roar, a slowly moving fog makes a halt in a frame. Hint of a catastrophic emotion mixed with an ash gray chunk of a smoke leaves a compelling impression. The ambivalence of a somber despair of destruction and its ulterior visual allure echoes an artistic agony. An absence of communication to an artist is as devastating as everything turning into ashes. The collision between an absoluteness of a phenomenon, an illusion of reality in its art form, and an unfathomable arena between art and its audience makes everything vanish into a dust. Especially, in Telescope Series, Lee gives the audience an eternal role of a bystander. The process of looking at reality through an illusory lens, creating one¡¯s own imagination through it, then to place that back onto a plane of reality displaces the audience into a borderline of obscurity. Likewise, by exposing the white part of the paper, Lee yet again affirms the disjunction between truth and phantom in her work.

Yujin Lee uses a traditional monochromatic drawing to recreate a scene of an explosion taken from various broadcasting media. As a secondary experience, the vivid reality has already become unreal, and Lee metamorphoses it once more into another realm, art. She suitably uses pencil, conte, and charcoal to express a dispersing smoke that was also once a solid form-as all of above materials returns to its powder form after its use to create art. The soft tonal change of a black and white drawing shows its capacity to convey an artless despair in moderation, unreachable by any colored work.

Yujin Lee depicts her explosions with an insight into truth and phantom. An obvious fact can be detached from its truth once it is tarnished by a mediation, and there forms an unbound space for interventions of individual cognition. At a glance, Lee¡¯s work seems like a simple reproduction of an existing image. However, below the surface, the artist contemplates on her role of walking on the intangible boundaries. Lee strives to shake the sensibility of the audience to provide a stimulating visual experience, and ultimately seeks to form a consensual feeling of despair. The exhibition focuses on Lee¡¯s reinterpretation of explosion images with simple drawings. Through her work, the audience has an opportunity to grasp the phenomenal aesthetics on the surface and the feeling of despair resulting from the work¡¯s disorienting separation from reality.