New Media: Review The Old And Learn The New_curated by Sung Eun PARK
Having majored in Sculpture, the artist Lee Nam Lee was first interested in animation, and then studied media art. He is now referred to as a new media artist. Animation made by cutting edge technology offers a possibility for new art that traditional art was limited to express in a variety of ways. In new art, the space and time, and the cultures between the East and West are overlapped and juxtaposed; their differences become meaningless. To Lee, the creation is born through our history that already exists, science and technology, recycling of culture, unlimited matching of existing art, and a sort of retouch. For instance, Lee parodies Western paintings of Classicism, and borrows Korean traditional paintings in order to show his own unique art world through the use of digital animation techniques. Furthermore, a satellite appears in a traditional Korean landscape painting, and inversely many elements of our culture can be seen in paintings of Classicism, thus creating strange and unfamiliar images. This exhibition presents his major artworks that overlap between the East-West landscape paintings of the 18th century and the 21st century's landscapes, thus overthrowing the time flows of the past and the present, and revealing hybridized elements fused together the two different cultures of the East and the West. As a result, the masterpieces that used to be treated as antiquities and artifacts take off an aura of intense history and change back into a fresh outfit made by today's technology; hence, the masterpieces transcend boundaries between creation and reproduction, actuality and imagination, truth and fiction, and the East and the West, thus enjoying our time.
