Vita

A shimmering play of colors all around the walls welcomes visitors to the Berlin studio of the Korean artist Mi Kyung Lee. Large-format canvases pinned directly to the wall, covered all over with circular, overlapping and interpenetrating areas of color, like excerpts from a polyphonic, expansive color music. In addition, there are small-format, cushion-like pictures whose transparent application of paint conveys calm and meditative concentration. Everywhere in the spacious studio on the ground floor of a Kreuzberg apartment in an old building there are traces of intensive work processes: Ink pads made or purchased, sorted by size on the large workbench, next to them paints, pigments, brushes and tools. On the walls are the imprints of the colors that have created their own image through the canvas or paper. For two years, Mi Kyung Lee has been experimenting with new artistic techniques and forms of expression. Color has found its way into her black and white pictorial world, whose oil paintings, reminiscent of Far Eastern ink painting, have been her unmistakable trademark for two decades. In conversation and when looking at her new works together, one notices the artist in her spontaneous joy and desire for discovery with which she has started this new series of works. A surprising step in her artistic development, but a step that, on closer inspection, has a logic inherent in her earlier paintings. (...)

Sepp Hiekisch-Picard
 

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Because if we take the time, which these pictures undoubtedly require, it is precisely the lack of motivic points of attraction, the absence of effects and sensations that sharpens the senses and throws the gaze back on itself: a painting without any claims; a painting whose pictorial world ultimately promises no more than we, the viewer, can redeem with our imagination, our memories and experience.

Dr Stefan Rasche

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A large number of actions lead to the formation of the image: in her work, Mi-Kyung Lee sets color in motion!
Despite all the differences in the approach and the differences in the painterly actions, from slow to very fast, it is noticeable that the artist maintains the secure calm in her work, in her handling of the paint, which the picture needs in order to be able to work the way it does met the viewer.

There are no limiting color schemes: you can always experience that the picture size and format are only the physical limits of what can be perceived. The intentions of the painter point far beyond the edge of the picture.

Before a specific motif reveals itself or motif associations form, something significant sets in: the process of creating a picture has to be understood.

The texture of the surface reveals what happened to impress the viewer so much. Different properties of the color material act in the form that occurs in each case - rich gloss, reflective, matt, dull or absorbent surface. They create changing perceptions.

Ekkehard Neumann

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