Marks from the Past
Curator’s Note
Jee Young Maeng | Independent Curator
Sungmi Lee spent the majority of her twenties and thirties in the United States. The questions of identity she faced abroad, followed by the sense of cultural estrangement she encountered upon returning to her home country, have profoundly shaped her artistic world. While these themes are not always explicitly stated in her work, a closer look at her materials and her approach to them reveals an abstraction imbued with human anguish and a deep compassion for the alienated and discarded. Much like the slow process of getting to know another person, Lee spends long hours meticulously exploring materials such as acrylic, shattered windshield glass, and resin. She manipulates these materials until the original material becomes unrecognizable, turning them into surfaces and shapes. Her works take various forms: the soot of incense, photographs capturing the texture of the street, traces formed by dripping resin, or drawings created through repeated scraping and rubbing. Her new exhibition, Marks from the Past, centers on the journey of traces left by Lee’s abstract imagery, spanning from her early incense soot works (including Untitled #600) to her photographic works, the Unfolding series, and her early and recent drawings.
Despite her use of diverse media, the images in Lee’s work consistently lean toward abstraction. Her photography, featuring the view outside her Brooklyn studio or close-ups of the texture of the pavement, serves less as documentary records and more as snapshots of specific misty atmospheres or weather-induced moods that mirror the artist’s internal state. For instance, her three-dimensional works from the mid-to-late 2000s that trap incense soot in translucent acrylic boxes, her monochromatic line drawings on Mylar (a translucent plastic film), and particularly her drawings using various liquids over photographs or Diasec prints, all seem to create a secondary outer skin. This convergence of diverse materials into a final, translucent surface reveals a consistent direction in her practice.
While the artist’s choice of material is inevitable, it would have been difficult to predict how these materials would evolve through time. Lee engages in a long process of facing and answering the questions posed by the material and the work itself. This period, during which an unknowable, mysterious object gradually pushes its way into her inner world, is a process where the once transparent materials are slowly transformed, and a time when the artist must confront herself. Shattered glass fragments are reassembled and polished so smoothly that their seams vanish; transparent acrylic undergoes a similar process to achieve a translucent surface. Her new drawings, completed through a repetitive cycle of applying, scraping, and rubbing pigment powder, pencil, and various mixed media on wood panels, follow this same pattern. Interestingly, these recent drawings bear a striking resemblance to her older works across various media.
The translucent bodies Lee creates are the result of an arduous effort to filter and accept unpredictable external influences and interventions. She constantly seeks a balance between the compulsion to control her media and the need to acknowledge the uncontrollable nature of materials that permeate, deflect, reflect, or repel. Her work, which allows us to see the paradoxical beauty of the jagged, uneven textures of life, is now moving toward a new horizon beyond the persistent practice of refinement she engaged in during the past decade. It is no coincidence that traces of her early work are visible in many of her new drawings. These sleek and shimmering translucent surfaces have now become "half-open" doors, as critic Nayeon Gu notes, that embrace both the artist’s and the viewer's gaze. Lee’s introspective practice does not remain anchored in the past; instead, it invites us to imagine a landscape of beautiful traces we will one day encounter.