Joshua Liner Gallery

Press Release

Joshua Liner Gallery is pleased to present "Village of Wind," an exhibition of new mixed-media works by the San Francisco-based Korean artist David Choong Lee. This is Lee's first solo show with the gallery.

Lee deploys the portrait as one element within a larger world of signs, patterns, and contemporary mark-making. Whether in paint-on-canvas works or as part of his signature, stacked installations, Lee's portraits leap out from busy agglomerations of logos, street signs, stars, stripes, and innumerable other symbols of today. Lee's site-specific installations expand this approach into the third dimension. These towering systems of stacked box forms are seductive armatures for painted faces and patterns, a compelling representation of the many facets of "Generation Next."

In "Village of Wind," cigar boxes are the foundation for uniquely portable works that celebrate the vitality and style of contemporary youth culture. With a combination of portrait painting, collage, and bold graphic elements, Lee depicts freewheeling figures engaged in various activities—skateboarding, parcour, or simply flying through the air. These colorful, energetic youth are set amid backgrounds of dots, wavy lines, and other graphic patterns that wrap around and accentuate the works' sculptural dimensions.

This dynamic visual style recalls Gustav Klimt's innovative merging of bold patterns with portraits of fin de siècle bohemians, suggesting that youth culture perennially shapes and energizes the wider social atmosphere surrounding it. Lee's cigar-box portraits, installations, and other works contain a wide range of visual and stylistic influences, including Van Gogh-style brush strokes, Rembrandt lighting, Sukdo, as well as inspiration from underground music and DJ scenes.

David Choong Lee was born in 1966 in Seoul, Korea. He moved to the United States in 1993 and graduated from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco in 1997 where he now teaches figurative art. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions in San Francisco at Babylon Falling (2007), 111 Minna Gallery (2000 and 2004), Fine Art Gallery at the Academy of Art University (2000), and at Artinus Gallery (Seoul, Korea, 2003). Selected group exhibitions include Locked & Loaded, Joshua Liner Gallery (2008); Sweet Calaveras, Yves Laroche Gallery, Montreal (2007).

Artist
David Choong Lee

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