Lotte Gallery Dongtan — the drawing artist beloved by celebrities
An artist who delivers powerful messages through line, on view until August 20
Lotte Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Sung Lip, a drawing artist who expresses rich emotion with a single line, at its Dongtan branch through August 20.
Sung Lip, an artist who conveys powerful messages with spare lines, has received offers from a range of brands including BMW, Prada, Diptyque and Golden Goose, presenting collaborative works imbued with narrative. The artist is also well known to the public through collaborations with celebrated musicians such as SHINee, Red Velvet and DEAN.
In this exhibition, titled ‘Fragments of the Wave,’ the artist presents works that are the result of looking inward and endlessly contemplating one’s attitude toward life.
Filled with lines and empty space, Sung Lip’s works may appear somewhat sparse, yet even with simple achromatic lines alone they deliver the intended message with striking intensity.
Over the past several years the artist has focused on anonymous crowds, fragmented forests, the shapes of broken people, and figures that gather and then scatter. Through this exhibition, the artist took time to reflect more deeply on that existing body of work. As time passes, sparks spread, people scatter and forests expand, while the entropy (degree of disorder) of the world increases. The artist came to believe that this goes beyond the laws of physics and is also connected to the psychological state of the individual.
In this exhibition, titled ‘Fragments of the Wave,’ the artist presented works that are the result of looking inward and endlessly contemplating one’s attitude toward life. As the artist’s standing grows larger, Sung Lip’s presence in private life sometimes grows smaller, and at other times the opposite unfolds. In these increasingly disordered and confusing circumstances, the artist is in the midst of a process of working and growing, wrestling with what attitude to take.
The exhibition space is divided broadly into three sections. Beyond the drawings depicting the artist facing his own greatly enlarged self, visitors can view the artist’s diary, filled with countless anxieties about one’s existence in the universe. Finally, the exhibition concludes with a chandelier installation created through the direct participation of the visitors themselves. The acrylic pieces hung by the many visitors gradually gather in the air to form the swell of a wave.
The artist says that the entire exhibition hall is a single work. He gave it the title ‘Fragments of the Wave’ in the hope that visitors to the hall would, through the exhibition, become part of a great wave and experience the process of splitting apart, expanding and coming together again.
