Since the early 1990s, Inhyeon Lee (b. 1958) has been exploring the art historical structures that shape our perception of painting. Lee has been questioning the facets as a front in modernist painting, and presenting a multi-layered exploration of painting for the past 30 years in his series L'épistémè of Painting.

The ‘L'épistémè of Painting’ that unify his oeuvre originated from Michel Foucault's philosophical concept of 'L'épistémè'. Michel Foucault said that every discourse has a structure of perception that underlies it and that it has periods of time like strata, which he called 'L'épistémè'. With a series of paintings that emphasize the side, Lee reveals the art historical history accumulated in the frontality of traditional painting and creates a new stratum in the structure of our perception of painting.

Inhyeon Lee's paintings extend beyond the front of the canvas to the sides, top, and bottom, as well as the corners. To emphasize the sides, the artist chose a three-dimensional canvas with a sense of thickness rather than a conventional canvas. Furthermore, at the moment of painting, the front is displayed as a side and the side as a front.

In some cases, the two canvases are glued face-to-face so that the front is hidden by the joint and only the side is presented, and in other cases, the canvas fabric is completely unfolded and fixed in a way that makes both the front and the side become the front. In Lee's paintings, the distinction between front and side eventually becomes meaningless.

Another characteristic of Lee's paintings is his technique of letting the paint soak into the canvas. Instead of making a "stroke of the master" on the canvas, he deliberately excludes the artist's hand. Instead of touching the brush directly to the canvas, he holds it still to allow the paint to drip, placing the diluted oil paint on the cloth.

All of these actions, which emphasize the materiality of the work and deconstruct the notion of completeness guided by the artist's hand, expand the realm of visual appreciation, forcing us to think about the structure of our perception of painting. As such, each work is not a single, finished piece, but an ongoing work on the ‘L'épistémè of Painting’ that runs through his life, every act of thinking about art.

This subversion of traditional painting, which emphasizes the frontal canvas frame and the artist's hand, has been the foundation of Lee's work, showing various variations.

He creates symmetry by applying traces of paint that ooze equally from the top and bottom, or by placing thin smears of paint like mist or fog at the joints of other connected canvases on a wide, blue surface like the ocean, or by making small and large dots (holes) appear and disappear on thinly sliced cheese-like canvases, a few dots on a dice-shaped cube with rounded corners in a gestural painterly arrangement, and so on, all of which have a sculptural quality to them, and induce the viewer to look at them from the side.

Meanwhile, Inhyeon Lee's 2006 painting L'épistémè of Painting was created in a different way. The artist first wrapped a canvas cloth around a long wooden stick and soaked it in dark blue paint, then used the stick as a brush to sweep the paint across a large expanse of raw canvas without stopping to avoid smearing it. The wooden stick glides across the canvas at a steady pace, neither close to nor completely off the canvas.

Like the previous method, which excludes the artist's intervention, this technique relies on the role of the canvas and the long rod. The painting created by friction leaves little room for the artist's intention or control. The subtle irregularities and variations of the canvas are left as traces with the trembling of the hand. The resulting canvas screens are then partially selected for frames of canvases of different sizes, and the canvases are reassembled into works.

Lee's L'épistémè of Painting series, subtitled 'Refurbished', is another example of Lee's experimentation with the medium of painting. By using cloth as a base, testing the consistency of paint, reconstructing previously made works into new ones, or adding 'objects' such as work tables, brushes, coffee cups, or children's shoes to the 'works', Lee demonstrated that every work can be 'refurbished' as another work, and every object as a new role for other objects.

Furthermore, the artist has made various attempts such as using the exhibition space itself as a frame for the paintings, reminding us of the problems posed by frames; stacking works that are more than 10 years apart in age to show the context of the images; and introducing the concept of 'featuring', superimposing Jung Kwang Ho's works and his own works on top of each other to show the physical cohabitation of sculptures that lack mass and paintings that have thickness.

The latest work in the series, L'épistémè of Painting - Lagrangian point, is made up of "works including frames," which introduce colorful variations on the spatial divisions that define the interior and exterior of the work. The frames that enter the work's territory do not limit the space of the work but rather blur its boundaries. The wire extending from the wall brings the wall beyond the canvas into the work.

The subtitle, ‘Lagrangian point,’ is a special solution to the unsolvable three-body problem, referring to the point in an orbit where gravitational equilibrium is achieved between two celestial bodies. The Lagrangian point is named for the point where the mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange found an exception to the unsolvable three-body problem where gravity becomes zero, unlike the gravitational action between two points that is clearly defined by Newton's universal gravitation.

Lee's paintings, which exist as an exception among traditional paintings, are located at the 'Lagrangian point' and invite the viewer to squint against the framework of painting that demands frontality and completeness, to view the work with the time it has been constructed in mind, and to reconsider the concept of completeness. Lee's work breaks down the idea of the main and the peripheral, the unfinished and the finished, the past and the present.

"Rather than arbitrarily drawing a certain image, I have a production process that allows it to come out naturally and physically. There are works on the side, so you can't help but walk around and look at them. Rather than appreciating the image created by the artist, you can appreciate it by following the way the work is done." (ABN, Interview with Inhyeon Lee, 2024.04.04)

Inhyeon Lee holds a B.F.A in Art from College of Fine Art in Seoul National University, and a M.F.A and a D.F.A from College of Fine Art in Tokyo National University. Lee currently serves as professor of painting in the Painting Department in Hansung University.

He has held lots of solo exhibitions in Korea and Japan and taken part in many group exhibitions in art institutions and museums at home and abroad including the National Museum of Modern Art in Seoul, Grand Palais in Paris, Seibu Museum of Art in Tokyo, the National Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, Artcore Gallery in Los Angeles, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. His works are housed at the National Museum of Modern Art in Seoul, the British Museum and Seoul Museum of Art, etc.

References

• 노화랑, 회화의 지층 – 옆에서 바라본 그림 (Rho Gallery, Paintings Seen from the Side)
• 윤난지, ‘그림 바라보기’에 대한 이인현의 생각
• 노화랑, 회화의 지층 – 옆에서 바라본 그림 (Rho Gallery, Paintings Seen from the Side)
• 가인화랑, 100% REFURB SHOW (Gaain Gallery, 100% REFURB SHOW)
• ABN, <전시> ‘길이와 넓이와 두께에 관한 시간’, 2024.04.04