Leehaiminsun, Planta erectus, 2010, Watercolor on paper, 37 × 51 cm © Leehaiminsun

Leehaiminsun's paintings are peculiar. They do not appear particularly well rendered, nor do they seem to invite elaborate interpretation. Yet there is something strangely compelling about them that captures one's attention.

Their lack of dramatic expression and polished refinement only makes them more enigmatic. The reason these paintings feel so unusual is, at least to me, that they summon a fleeting moment from a forgotten past into the present.

The house where I lived as a child was filled with dead flowerpots. There were cacti that had collapsed from being overwatered, dried-up trunks of flowering plants, or pots containing nothing but mounds of soil after every trace of life had disappeared. Yet these became indispensable materials for childhood games. The soil became rice, the flowerpots became bowls, and the dried branches and leaves became chopsticks and side dishes.

Though discarded, these flowerpots were, for me, sites of lived experience. I remember stirring the soil with wooden sticks, shaping damp earth into round rice balls on the veranda, alongside a thin hose and streams of water. These are the things Leehaiminsun paints: ordinary objects that are everywhere yet rarely noticed. Her gaze turns not upward but downward, not toward the front but toward what lies behind.

The motifs that appear in Planta erectus—flowerpots, plastic sheets, wooden beams—do not immediately imprint themselves upon the viewer because of the intensity of the backgrounds. The backgrounds, filled with seemingly empty and restrained colors, make these familiar objects appear strangely unfamiliar. This contrast between subject and background gives the Planta erectus forms the appearance of objective, almost detached beings.

Yet paradoxically, this very contrast evokes distant memories. Perhaps this is because the way her objects encounter one another—their colors, their materiality, and the manner in which they coexist—contains an ironic force capable of returning both time and space to another moment.

In Planta erectus, the wooden beam forms the structural center of the work. It willingly becomes a support for a collapsing tree and serves as the brace that allows discarded objects to become an upright plant. Once, the beam itself had been part of a living tree. Now, having been cut and processed, its life has disappeared, and it exists merely as a tool supporting another tree that once resembled itself.

By binding together these two entities—the dead wooden beam and the living yet dying tree—through the intermediary of a rope, the artist draws those destined to be forgotten or abandoned into her own world and breathes life into them. In doing so, she demonstrates that neither is useless and that both may exist anew.

The irony, however, lies in the fact that the living tree, which represents the past, and the wooden beam, which symbolizes the present, are joined together by the rope. In other words, it is the dead present that sustains the living past.


Leehaiminsun, Anchovy Landscape, 2005, Single-channel video, 3 min 37 sec © Leehaiminsun

The artist's interest in such irony did not begin with Planta erectus. In the video work Anchovy Landscape (2005), dried anchovies—already dead and processed—are shown boiling in water. Accompanied by music, they appear to come alive, as though dancing a waltz.

The work is ironic in that the dead anchovies become the support upon which the life—or the memory of life—of the other is sustained, while simultaneously suggesting a return to the past. Likewise, in Planta erectus, although the mode of expression has changed from that of Anchovy Landscape, the artist's underlying consciousness remains remarkably consistent.

Yet whereas Anchovy Landscape approached the irony of life through the black humor of dead anchovies seemingly dancing a waltz, Planta erectus advances this inquiry one step further.

The central concern that emerges throughout Leehaiminsun's practice is the irony that the dead present sustains the living past (or that the "dead self" makes the "living self" possible). It is precisely this irony that lends her work its peculiar quality. In Planta erectus, however, another stage becomes visible.

Rather than merely juxtaposing past and present, death and life, the artist binds them together with a "rope" in search of a new mode of existence. In other words, instead of remaining at the level of the futile traces of death and life, she reveals, through their union, the possibility of discovering new life—or, as the title “Planta erectus” suggests, a determination to stand on one's own.

The dead present, the living past, and all things abandoned and broken no longer exist for the sake of something else; they begin, at last, to move of their own accord.

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