July 16, 2018, Artist's statement of Lee houk

I could not get away from this place where everywhere was blocked. My pain, chagrin, and frustration. Even in a devastating situation, the instinct of hope that I should live was suddenly appearing. But it only reaffirms my desperate situation of helpless struggle.

It’s like “Self house arrest”. I have isolated myself. Without interaction with others, I had nothing to do. Hopelessness and helplessness made me sink under the water. When feelings of joy and sorrow touch the floor, When there is no more place to run away, When all play I can do is no longer fun, I could face the reality of self-consciousness by facing inside.

My consciousness (feelings) and emotions began to be hacked through the scenery of landscape of mountains facing isolation. The Landscape paintings with dry brushes were done at a languid pace. Because it is the drawing of the existence and the state which can not be expressed with the language and the text, pay attention to what I want to reveal invisible, I had to find the inevitable trajectory of linearity.

I use my entire body when I use a brush. In the naked state (consciousness of nakedness), I use my whole body including my spine and shoulders as well as my arms and wrists to move the brush. To control the ink in the brush thoroughly, I believe that the muscles and kinetic energy of the whole body should be concentrated and poured out.

I recognize paper like skin. It feels like a piece of paper that is torn apart, sticks again, blooms and spreads. Using a grid of trees and rocks that are not moving, I capture the "Human expression“ by wrinkled lines. It can also be called 'work to pulling the inner feelings up to the surface'. The stage can only be reached through isolation and desolation. In uninhabited forests and coastline, the work went very slowly. As like rubbing a face, I carefully paint my feelings with a brush.

When I went to Jeju Island and saw the sea in the rain and wind, I felt free sometimes. I lived the life of a stranger who escaped with a mix of comfort and isolation and a mixture of resentment and longing. Since when I have been using the mental state of such isolated situations as a condition for drawing and an expanded medium for material-forms.

On a remote island in the Pacific Ocean, I was fascinated by the beauty of the underwater world, and I floated far away from the island, and I drifted away using my goggles and fins borrowed from the locals. I wandered around feeling how small I was in front of the noble spirit of the sea and the majestic nature. I had to drink a lot of seawater on my way back to land. A year later, coral habitats and tropical fishes wriggling in my memory. It was an experience that made me forget the dark reality of the real world and the feelings I wanted to die.

I had been painting a landscape of shaking mountains and stuffed animals. After that experience, I am sinking all the objects of the painting into the underwater world.

The experience of isolation, desolate and drifting has opened up a new world called 'the rediscovery of the self.' It operates in a context similar to the time of darkness in anonymous forests. The separation or disconnection from the civilization has made it possible to open the eyes of a previously unknown contemplation.