Artist David Choong Lee, born in 1966 in Seoul, Korea, relocated to the USA in 1993 at 27 after completing his military service, graduated from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco in 1997 and then after seven years of focusing on figurative work creatively exploded into a wide and proliferate range of mixed media, sculpture and graphic design works. His influences are far and wide, including such diverse sources as Van Gogh, Rembrandt, and the underground music DJ scene.
This cultural and aesthetic rebirth of Choong Lee resulted in a unique practice, a blend of formally trained figurative art, graffiti, collage, portrait, and classical realistic skill juxtaposed with bold graphic elements. This man is as proliferate as they come, many have commented about his studio being literally jam-packed with an abundance of work, his installation work being some of the most complex and gallery space consuming of their kind.
Choong Lee's work has been exhibited at many galleries including Culture Cache, White Walls (SF), OPUS as well as many other spaces in the US and South Korea. He has even self-published a number of urban art collection books such as God made dirt, and dirt don't hurt, 4 WORDS, DIRT– some of which are distributed by Gingko Press and 2nd round productions to Europe and Asia.
He’s been teaching figurative art at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco for last 10 years (from 1998) and continues to work at a prolific rate, most recently exhibiting at the Joseph Gross Gallery in Tucson – see the show at Flickr.
I believe there's a concurrent theme in a lot of his work, comparable, at least metaphorically with the hanged man character in a Tarot deck, a figure in limbo, lost between two worlds. On the face of that remark you'd be forgiven for thinking this is a blatant reference to supposed Vietnamese / American culture clash. Far from it. Not that I am denying such an experience would have an impact, but much more so I'd say Choong Lee's work reflects a social and cultural clash predominant in both countries. The rich versus the poor, the sane and the insane, the haves and the have nots (be it rights, recognition, respect, responsibility etc.), the criminality of government no matter how it describes its own regime versus the legitimisation of action through peer pressure and non-conformity, and the urban wasteland that provides the backdrop to a history of broken dreams, be it old school communist paranoia, or a new wave of economic apocalypse.
In other words, if you seek answers, if you view the pyramidal power structure of everything with something resembling suspicion, if you have heard it all before yet still, in your own creative thinking further argument through the subjective logic of human experience as opposed to the media-enhanced and widely acceptable mode of subjugation through objectivization, then you are not alone. Indeed sooner or later you will most likely be in the majority. This rise of the estranged depicted so boldly and assuredly by Choong Lee's urban hybridization of traditional art and the impact of graffiti and design upon it, is if anything, a panorama, a landscape of portraiture. A field of emotion interlaced with the brutalism of artifice, a cross-section of data that cannot be recorded with the blunt tools of current technology.
Choong invites you to take your place as another, to gaze at yourself and your surroundings through his and all his subjects' eyes. To be born and raised under a military government, a coup d’etat which negated any sense of progressive culture, that is to say freedom of expression but for the pastiched nostalgia of a long dead Cold War, at least in other parts of the world, and then to be hurled into the chaos of a culture rife with inequality, powered by the mechanisms of capitalism, overriding the notion of a common good to gain a little advantage over the competition, in some ways the enemy, the enemy being our fellow man.
We fight each other every day for supremacy, someone makes a million dollars, another starves to death, one man's gain is another's loss, we can neither involve or absolve ourselves without engaging in some kind of personal war of attrition. A new spirituality, one without senseless hope or projectile machinations of imagination, providing the most release with the least time and effort, a process of management of the soul is Choong Lee's route out of this man-made hell. For him it is in his art that he both embraces and escapes the purgatory of our collective reality, in doing so he provides the viewer with that very same opportunity.
See more of David Choon Lee's work at www.davidchoonglee.com.
Tags: America, David Choong Lee, installation, Korea, painter
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