Eunsae Lee’s upcoming solo exhibition is titled 《mite life》. Here, mite may mean the arachnid pests, but also a small child or animal, especially when regarded as an object of sympathy. For 《mite life》, Lee presents points of connection between personal anecdotes and matters of historical record, across the subject of water and with minor episodes involving mites. Water and mites are seemingly unrelated things, but share an aspect of trivial mundanity, or just not very impressionable daily. That is to say, mites in this exhibition are not about the pests but the meek and insignificant deserving of sympathy.

This exhibition was conceived from a personal experience. Lee was parched, but also drowsy. So much so that she wished not to step any further than she must; she had returned from a night out drinking. Finding an open plastic bottle, she took a swig. She did not remember why the bottle was there or when it was opened. It hardly mattered. Once her thirst was quenched, she could not shake off the question of why that bottle was there. Was it food poisoning, or just an upset stomach? Was it all in her head? Uncomfortable thoughts raced through her mind all night. Coming back to her senses, she was struck by how much her experience resonated with that of Wonhyo (617-686 CE) the Buddhist philosopher. Imgallok (林間錄: Anecdotes from the Groves [of Chan]), written during China’s Song Dynasty, chronicles Wonhyo and his scholar-monk companion Uisang setting off to Tang China to study the Yogācāra teachings. The story goes that the pair are caught in a heavy downpour and forced to take shelter in what they believed to be an earthen sanctuary. During the night Wonhyo is overcome with thirst, and reaching out grasps a gourd and drinks; refreshed with a draught of cool, refreshing water. Upon waking the next morning, however, the companions discover that their shelter was in fact an ancient tomb littered with human skulls, and the vessel from which Wonhyo had drunk was a human skull full of brackish water. Eunsae Lee was researching more on this story when she found an even more amazing account of the two companions. Told that Uisang encountered the physical incarnate (眞身) of Bodhisattva Guanyin at Naksansa Temple, Wonhyo also heads to slopes of Naksan Mountain. On his way, he encounters a woman by the river, washing clothes. Thirsty from his long walk, Wonhyo asks the woman for water. The woman scoops up a fill of water from the river, but it is red with the sanitary napkins she had been laundering. Wonhyo is taken back, and spills the water. It was later that Wonhyo comes to realize that the woman was the physical incarnate of Bodhisattva Guanyin.

In the two tales of Wonhyo, water is a recurring metaphor. It serves as a means for enlightenment, a transcendent presence. Clearly, the artist’s experience were not literal reiterations of Wonhyo’s path to enlightenment, but she experienced water as a passage of emotional transformation, change in perspective, or even a realm of multitudinous dimensions or thought patterns. Both Lee and Wonhyo’s journey to change start from an object of seeming mundanity. Both experience water through change in the inner state, regardless of actual space and time. In that state, water is the medium, and the Lee wished to paint still life of water as a still medium that is completely unmoving, but with an aspect of subtleness.

Mites also brought about perceptual change, gradually showing up in her works as a point of interest. Certain trivial things tend to generate obsessive behavior once it enters the mind. The artist suffered an infestation of mites for some time and remembers struggling with an obsessive desire to be completely rid of them, to the point of developing a problematic anxiety. She wished that she could return to a point in time when she was not aware of their existence, but also, she knew that she was obsessing over something could be trivial. Paradoxically, the impact of trivial things can be more unsettling and shocking. Both water and mites shared that sense of triviality amplified into something far greater in effect and experience.

Anecdotes, mishaps, and even the mundane experiences that caused a shift in the artist’s inner person have long been the moments that Lee has tried to capture on canvas. Those subversive and uncanny moments captured her interest, and she extrapolated upon them, and took them further in her imagination. The artist likens her paintings to a soliloquy. Like self-utterance, her works are often enigmatic and not immediately decipherable, but they also work to check and balance her practice from falling into some narrow corridor or branch. If there is one thing that her latest exhibition brings to her practice is a shift to objects rather than situations or characters.

The No.300 canvas size (290cm wide) of Mite life 1 is a mingling of Wonhyo’s skull-water experience and the artist’s own unfortunate swig. The other No.300 canvas work Mite life 2 shows a skull placed like a 17th-century Dutch still life Vanitas. Both works feature skeletons, but context defines which is that of Wonhyo or of Vanitas. The two are unrelated, but the shared skull-object in each are interpreted variably. In Pine-skull, a female figure holds an object that appears to be something of a skull and a pineapple. Like an optical illusion of mundane objects, they possibly are loose and illusive allusions to Vanitas or Wonhyo. Works such as Mite life 4 and Still life with Tulips are not still-lifes with intentional compositions. Rather, they are fleeting snapshots that quickly capture moments of objects and situations before they continue on their effervescence.

By now, exhibition title 《mite life》 may have given away its spin on still-life. 17th-century Dutch Vanitas still-life paintings are arguably the most widely known in the genre. That century was when Europeans underwent the Reformation and the Black Death; instantly subverting and even destroying a significant portion of their splendid culture and civilization. The experience of those events impacted art, and still-life paintings came to the forefront with themes reflecting upon materiality and upon death and what lies beyond. To human beings, some things are familiar, only natural, and taken for granted, but still-life reveals that it is not actually so. The delicately realistic depictions of Vanitas are not in Lee’s intertwining of historical events and personal anecdotes, past and present, figurative and non-figurative composition on the ultimately ambiguous and unfamiliar canvas. What is on canvas is the artist’s desire to present a stationary object that exudes some thing. Perhaps it is the thing that subverts the expectation placed on familiar objects; the thing that changes the inner self. And through this subversion, Lee’s still works pay homage to the function and meaning of the Vanitas; not its format.

References

• 갤러리 2 (Gallery 2)