Lee Heum: Homecoming Exhibition [Real Abstraction]

In this exhibition, Lee Heum develops an abstract beauty out of the realistic, charming images of candy and cake he has long painted. The forms depicted call to mind no particular image — they are pure, chance-born patterns of strong randomness. But they were not improvised directly on canvas: the artist paints from forms first generated by a computer program. Through this work, he means to suggest that the aesthetic image a work carries does not exist only as an improvised result arrived at on the canvas, but already exists in the artist's mind before it is expressed through the fingertips — the hand merely translates it. That is why some works are titled Real Abstraction, a compound of Realism and Abstraction. When generating shapes with the program, the artist relies entirely on sensibility, letting forms and colors emerge that subjectively attract him. Then, painting on canvas, he composes an abstraction built from carefully calculated color and mark-making. The artist is intrigued by the phrase "painting an abstraction" itself: unlike traditional abstract methods that exclude any element of chance, he first realizes through computer a form that, while not yet concrete in his mind, already carries an aesthetic sensibility — then translates it by observing it and painting. This contradictory juxtaposition of an artificial, mechanized process and a human painting process invites us to reconsider our standards of beauty in a thought-provoking way. Have you ever wondered whether we are already deeply assimilated into an artificial sensibility? Most of the visible aesthetic standards around us are, in one way or another, artificial. For this exhibition, the artist has chiefly distorted the candy imagery he has long worked with, in order to bring new aesthetic forms into being.