The work of Junwon Lee (b. 1983) conveys archaic movements. A primal almost ritualistic ebb and flow that at times appears familiar and recognisable and at others chaotic and strange.
Lee sees his role as an artist as not necessarily to create, but rather to salvage and draw from something that already exists, intuitively capturing images in an open, free and spontaneous way as inspiration and feeling move through him and onto the canvas.
Painting ‘in the round,’ Lee works on flat canvas, moving about and rotating the work as the moment takes him, a process he deploys to further remove barriers and restrictions on his creativity, putting on canvas what he feels. The artist refers to this process as summoning, of forming shapes, or totems, that shift during creation, allowing the motion to be infused into the work through its very creation.
This work, Balthamor (2022), is demonstrative of Lee’s unique approach to painting, a literal manifestation of his process and speaks to the larger creative process many artists or creatives wrestle with every day. Their muse, their inspiration and how that inspiration works through them, dances back and forth, twists and flows, pushes and pulls to create a new work.
In this instance, rather than depicting a dance or ritual within the canvas he explored the process of how his creative muse danced with him internally, outside the canvas, in the work’s creation. It is a physical representation of the internal creative process.
The name is made up, a mythical entity Lee created to embody the creative process through which this work was created. “I wanted to give a unique name to the entity contained within this work. They who salvaged the pieces from the abyss and then [through me] placed them onto the canvas.”
This unification is presented in the final piece through the opposing colours that are present, with both “creators” having left their permanent mark on the newly created piece.
The interior of the A.SINGLE.PIECE gallery contains a video installation related to Balthamor.
JUNWON LEE CV
Junwon Lee’s exhibition at A.SINGLE.PIECE marks his fifteenth solo exhibition, and his first in Australia. His works have been exhibited at numerous international art fairs in France, Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as in Korea and he has been featured in more than twenty five group exhibitions. Lee is a graduate of Chung-ang College of Art.