Brush _ Tension of Aesthetics ● The beautiful water flow under the high sky Where the morning sun shines upon Where is it going? / The dropped water brings waves and silence But not that water flow / The running and silence water flow Again it accommodates the consonance of the changing water's rhythm Recollect the delight and sweet In the beautiful autumn It suddenly changed into gravity / It's time for the sharpness brush
1.Objectivity In the past, most critics discussed his works' beauty of form by hyperrealism and photorealism. This may be because they focused on the existence of brush in his works. The brushes in his works are even more real than those real ones, this is a good reason and also the truth. On the other hand, he always denominates his works as "brush" which can show his subjective view of the existence of brush. What's more, brush is the only image appeared in his works for a long time. However, another important role in Lee Jungwoong's works besides the brush which we can't ignore is the abstractive trances which were brought by the brushes. Those trances prominented his brush and made it more real than the real brushes, and they also showed the reason why the brush appeared there. Lee Jungwoong's paintings are for collecting the brush and ink just like the relationship n of longitude and latitude. The trances on the paper are the power which can give the brush life and make it looks like real ones.
2. The Conflict between Realistic and Abstraction The brush together with its continuous tone and its diverse forms mixed up the abstraction and the artist Lee Jungwoong's conception. There are two kinds of human being's creative desire. One is imitate desire which focuses on reappearing the image. The other one is art desire which focuses on pursuing spiritual. This kind of part in visual art works belongs to the artist's nation and the times. It existed in the times of concept and abstract artists, and it is like the manners of eastern people attaching much weight to spirit but western people to matter. This manners influenced artists and they acted by their understanding of it. People who like his works used to analyze his brush from the extra-realistic conception. However, the brush on paper is just his agent. What Lee Jungwoong put his sentiment in is the brush in his hand. The abstractive impulse contains imagination, the act of expressing the dots, lines and plane is the symbolic system of Lee Jungwoong's imagination. Most critics consider his works as extra-realistic conception. But the truth is, his works are the combination of conception and abstraction. These factors make up the unique intense painting of Lee Jungwoong.
3. Speak and Attract Lee Jungwoong's brush can speak, and the traces of it attracted us. We have been looking forward to talk to the art works for a long time. For a simple example to distinguish between speak and attract, the ability of speak comes from the basic knowledge. The brush in Lee Jungwoong's paintings does not speak to us directly, it's only itself who understands what it speaks. It speaks to itself but not to us. What the artist wants to express is on his paintings, and it is sometimes quiet, sometimes noisy, sometimes gentle, sometimes rude, sometimes it even break up the original format. His brush exists for "protrusion", on the other hand, the symbolic of his brush is to test whether the audiences can understand and ensure the existence of the brush or not. So his paintings may become the body with soul if we just focus on what his brush means. What if there is no brush in his paintings? It may bring another kind of wonderful tension to the paintings, but it can also make the paintings to be terrible works just like cold body without soul.
4. Old topics always mean wonderful when people talk about art works at forums. So my statement of his works' loftiness comes from Immanuel Kant's "Kritik der Urteilskraft(Critique of Judgement)" : Beauty is related to the form of the object, but lofty doesn't have a concrete object. Beauty is showed by the limited perception concept, but lofty is showed by the unlimited rational concept. Beauty is the union of quality representation, while lofty is the union of quantity representation." Beauty can directly promote people's sentiment in their life, while lofty is the pleasure which occurred indirectly or much more stronger sentiment after a pause. Beauty is the combination of imagination of a game, while lofty is not a game but seriousness.
■ Kim, Mi-Ryoung