Lee Jeonglok : Parallel Worlds: Tree of Life & Nabi

Lee Jeonglok is an established Korean artist, represented in many international collections, with an extensive, world-wide record of solo and group exhibitions. He has shown frequently with the Pontone Gallery and we are pleased to showcase these new and exclusive works.

The production of these pieces is a complex and painstaking process. These images are not made digitally, but by an ‘in camera’ technique. This means using long and multiple exposures, manipulating artificial light and deploying various props on site and in real time. The physicality and engagement of this process is important to the artist. He states that this effort allows him to reveal another, parallel world.

‘Nabi’, the butterfly, is a valued image and symbol. It is an interlocutor to the spiritual world, somewhere that is significant for this artist to locate and reveal in his work. This image, created out of light, multiplies into clusters and bunches, forming clouds that glow and sparkle in the landscape. Existing only for an instant, the length of a photoflash, these ‘Nabi’ express something other, a world conjured out of the artist’s perception and now revealed to us.

The artist also presents us with startlingly intense, almost blood-red images of trees, reflected in a pool, the whole suffused in this saturated colour. The pictures invoke an air of earth-magic, or even science fiction, something mesmerising and hypnotic. We are reminded of the tree as a powerful symbol in folk-lore, myth and legend.

This is photography, not as a disinterested recorder of events, but as an expressive and transforming medium, through which, the artist introduces us to his intense and affecting world. His manipulations of camera technique immerse the viewer in a flickering, shifting dream-space of neon landscape and strange possibilities.

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