NYAB Event - Ji Soo Lee "Cityscape"

Ji Soo Lee "Cityscape"

Kips Gallery

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Another series that are of great importance to Ji Soo Lee’s practice consists of blurred, brilliantly colored vertical stripes. These very striking paintings, while dissimilar to her more figurative images at first, are, in fact, closely related to them. Like her Peach and Apple works, for instance, they shift between the abstract and representational. While they, too, deal with the formal—with light and color, with shapes that allude to modernist stripe paintings and op art—like her “fruit” projects, they are also pictures, their hallucinogenic bands of color the equivalent of a cityscape, which is what she calls them.

Lee’s Cityscapes feature luminous vertical bands of two colors or more--yellow and green; red and green; black and white; or a fuller palette—that emerge from a black ground, the dark appearing at intervals separating shafts of jeweled, saturated color. The edges of the bands are fuzzy, the shape elusive as if in motion and difficult to hold onto and fix in the eye, more light and space than solid form. Their flickerings create a pulse that conjures the flash of contemporary metropolises aglow in the animated, switched-on, night-into-day illumination as a kind of rhythmic breath that is synonymous with them. In that sense, they tip their hat to the syncopations of Mondrian’s Boogie-Woogies although Lee’s paintings don’t resemble the Dutch modernist’s landmark canvases. Reveling in nightlight when the city explodes with artificial colors, Lee condenses its countless radiant windows, electronic signage and other points of brightness into colored columns that synthesize metropolitan incandescence.

They are volumetric and seem to project forward and back, to swell and deflate, producing a kind of holographic or three-dimensional effect, acting as a portal into some imagined space that spins the familiar modernist motif of stripes into the present. Ultimately, although they can be parsed in many ways, they are foremost beautiful paintings, some immersive at 12 feet in length, drawing the viewer into their fictitious, psychedelic space, into altered states of mind and vision, offering an entrancing as well as unsettling experience.