Opening reception: Thursday, May 13, 6 - 8pm
Gana Art is pleased to present its upcoming exhibition by Sungmi Lee. Comprised of a selection of mixed media works and installations, this will be the artist's first solo exhibition in New York.
Having made the transition from Korea to the United States all alone at the age of fifteen, Sungmi Lee has found solace and spiritual healing through investing herself in a luminous body of work in multi-media. In her pursuit of peace and reconciliation to overcome inner turmoil and cultural displacement, Lee has re-imagined and re-shaped unconventional yet everyday materials to transcend their original purpose. Drawn mostly to translucent light materials such as glass, resin, clear beads, tape and smoke, Lee explores the delicate and fleeting nature of her world.
The ephemeral nature of smoke serves as metaphor for the fleeting moments that shape our daily lives. In her early works, Lee captures incense smoke in plexiglass, memorializing the moment in a gesture to the Buddhist rituals of her youth. In a separate photographic series, she captures smoke rising from a factory outside her studio as snapshots on film, documenting the immediate and continuing impact of industrial waste on our fragile surroundings.
In her more recent work, Lee mourns the death of her father by paying tribute with clear resin flower sculptures titled Flower 4 U. Delicate and weightless, these lotus petals seemingly float in mid-air. In a related series titled Crying for You, Lee paints and pours white resin to form a life-size biomorphic mass that continuously drips and accumulates into its circular sister-work, Painting by Sculpture (Crying for You).
Sungmi Lee's only dark colored works are two-dimensional wood panels covered with beads, black oil paint and clear resin. In one titled Starry Night with U, the movement of the stars in the night sky takes on added depth and light from the highly reflective gloss of clear resin that covers the work.
Lee explores the healing and meditative process that goes into creating her work, which entails the repetitive and painstaking process of reassembling countless pieces of discarded material and casting large amounts of resin to form whole new and natural forms. Her transformations are born not only of material and form, but also a profound sense of harmony engendered by melancholy.
Sungmi Lee received her M.F.A. from the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College. She has had a solo exhibition at C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland and her work has also been exhibited at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas and The National Academy Museum in New York City, among other venues. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
