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Yoon Lee

 

THE LUGGAGE STORE

1007 Market Street

July 07August 05

  

It's nearly impossible to clear a path through the forests of evolving technologies, overabundant media, and accelerated circuits of information framing our cynical, ambivalent stances (which we so easily affect), but Yoon Lee's graceful yet cacophonous acrylic paintings deepen the effort by visually rendering the dynamism of modern existence. Trafficking in Julie Mehretu's delicate tangles, but rendering them in bolder, thicker strokes, Lee works with slick surfaces, layering varying degrees of opacity. Semitranslucent areas resembling Vik Muniz's chocolate syrup are juxtaposed with denser sections channeling the flat color of a Matthew Ritchie. Lee's acrylic works are clearly digitally composedher perspectives exude the rubber-band tension of dramatic computer stretchingbut the works are the antithesis of digital output. Lee achieves a tactile quality unique to the act of painting. The slick surfaces vacillate between candy and chemical, tasty and toxic, a dynamic suitable to the primarily urban and industrial subject matter: riverlike freeways, architectural skeletons, airplane exhaust trails, power grids, and slightly blurred, undulating forms suggesting the intangible cell-phone microwaves constantly swirling around us. The pictures are painted on bright white PVC panels, a material that enhances the plasticity but also seems suited for works on a billboard scale. Lee places viewers directly into the fray, and in the scope of this exhibitionpart of the Tournesol Award to young Bay Area painters that Lee won last year that field sparkles with a keenly articulated static electricity.

 

-  Glen Helfand                                                                                                               

 

San Francisco Chronicle     July 15, 2006

 

Yoon Lee at the Luggage Store: Bay Area painter Yoon Lee won the Headlands Center for the Arts' Tournesol Award not long ago. The honor includes a solo exhibition at the Headlands, which the Luggage Store has brought to this side of the bay. Where or how does painting make contact with the reality that envelops it? For centuries, representation provided ready answers, even when painters represented things as hard to locate in space and time as saints and angels. In our era, within and outside of painting, we have seen representation mechanized and digitized, glorified, trivialized and abused no end. Lee acknowledges this state of affairs by using a computer to distort digitized images, some found, some made by her, into a maelstrom of forms. In "Seek and Destroy" (2005), we can recognize the silhouettes of structures such as giant wharf cranes, but other information appears stretched and tangled into webs beyond comprehension. Lee painstakingly fleshes out the figures in her pictures with resinous acrylic color applied using squeeze-nozzle bottles. The ambition and effort of Lee's pictures cannot fail to impress. But she seems to want us to respond with recognition -- the sort of recognition that realism can elicit -- to strains of experience that outstrip representation, as her very way of working acknowledges.

Inclusive as it tries to be, I miss in her work something that Moses never excludes: a sense of the absurdity of painting as rhetoric and a mode of production. It attests as nothing else can to a painter's recognition of the world and time in which he works.

-  Kenneth Baker

 

San FranciscoBay Guardian       Volume 40, Issue 41 | July 5 - July 11, 2006

 

Verve Syntheses

 

All that shiny, glossy stuff - so large, so speedy, so colorful, so alluring, and so deceitful and unfulfilling. Not just post-Pollock in their computer splatter approach, Yoon Lees paintings also possess a postpop cynicism about advertising imagery and consumer culture even if it isnt immediately apparent or spelled out through helpful text. How do graffiti and urban architecture figure as influences within Lees work? Placed next to each other, are these acrylic polymer and pigment monuments powerful or numbing? Lee's new show, "Verve Syntheses," at the ever great Luggage Store - recently given a deserved deluxe interview profile in ANP Quarterly - should provide some answers.

 

-  Johnny Ray Huston

SF Weekly      July 7, 2006

Yoon Lee Lifts Off

 

Artist Yoon Lee covers large plastic slabs in colorful lines, fluid whorls, and abstract shapes that look at once organic and computer generated, hinting at a tangle of intriguing ideas -- the Big Bang, the tracers after an explosion, the electrical blueprints of a power plant, the path of unknown orbits, the trajectories of neutrinos, the plumbing under a city, the sudden unraveling of the world's biggest ball of string. None of these, however, stands alone in explaining her work, and that's part of the attraction. Lee starts with a jumble of scanned images of engineering structures and the like, then lays down colored acrylic paint from bottles. Her work is big -- wait, make that huge. Her acrylic-on-PVC Reconstruction (a new beginning) measures 8 feet tall and 12 feet long, and it gives you plenty to look at, with hundreds of overlapping layers of paint, some strips rounded into orbits, other nudged into ordered rows, and more than a few blasting into space. Her gutsy mix of chaos and order, along with her bold use of color, is no surprise: In college, Lee studied computer science, mechanical engineering, and existential philosophy before switching to art, and in 2005 she landed a residency at Marin's prestigious Headlands Center for the Arts after winning the Tournesol Award.

 

-  Michael Leaverton