Dasan Museum of Art, through September 15
World-renowned media artist
The Dasan Museum of Art is holding the Lee Lee-nam invitational exhibition 'Dasan, Art' through September 15.
The Dasan Museum of Art is the first registered Class 1 private art museum in Jeollanam-do, located in Sapyeong-myeon, Hwasun-gun, Jeollanam-do. Since its opening, it has hosted exhibitions by accomplished artists and has played a major role in advancing the culture and arts of the local community.
This exhibition was organized in keeping with that founding spirit, inviting world-renowned media artist Lee Lee-nam to present his work. It is especially meaningful in that it is the first curated exhibition to be held among the private art museums in the Jeollanam-do region.
Lee Lee-nam is a new-media artist nicknamed 'the second Nam June Paik' for opening up new possibilities in contemporary art by borrowing from painting and reconstructing it as digital painting. Drawing great public attention, Lee's work embodies Eastern and Western codes read through his own distinctive vision. His digital art is a fusion of time and space achieved through the appropriation, interpretation, and reconstruction of images.
Lee Lee-nam made his name in the art world beginning with clay art animation work in the late 1990s, moving on to graphic animation work in the 2000s and winning the grand prize at the SK Telecom Animation Competition (2002). Then, starting with 'New-Ink Bamboo Painting,' his 2004 remediation of a masterpiece that would become his trademark, he began transforming existing paintings into digital media.
In 'New-Mona Lisa,' which appropriates the masterpiece of the century, the Mona Lisa, a wartime scene unfolds wittily before the Mona Lisa's eyes. His 2008 work 'New-Complete View of Geumgangsan' also renders the twelve thousand peaks of Geumgangsan in Lee Lee-nam's own way. Across his diverse digital art works, Lee Lee-nam fuses two different levels of the world through varied forms and content such as the contrast, complementarity, compromise, and mediation of images.
For Lee Lee-nam, who presents the future of the world by fusing everything—tradition and modernity, East and West, the material and the immaterial—art using digital technology is a space of infinite possibility for realizing his ideals. In Lee Lee-nam's works, which imbue still images with a sense of movement and layer time and space, viewers can discover a new utopia.