There is an Island between you and me, 1999

« Le signe est une fracture qui ne s'ouvre jamais
que sur le visage d'un autre signe. »
Roland Barthes

«My work is part of this quest for an intimate bond between nature and myself », explains Ms Lee. But, very often, this translates into a tension between human desires and a power almost unnatural.»

Although nature takes a very important place in her heart since her youth. Because what she misses the most from her native country are those pictures of the coastlines along the Eastern part of Korea. Long time before she left to Seoul, she would spend hours and hours watching the tide as if she would never see it again. Her long walk along the seashore then provided to her rest and warmth that she has since been looking for.

The movement on the canvas is brisk as moved by this thirst for freedom still unquenched. And the multiple forms isolated or intertwined bring a quiet and tranquil vision, the kind that would emerge after a terrible struggle between all the different forces of nature. The geometric constructions, sometimes barely visible, are then as marks of a fight where the canvas is a battlefield.

The shapes barely visible throughout her paintings seem to have their own life echoing seashells that she used to pick up while walking on the beach as a child. But, aren't these shapes like souvenirs of a life she's trying to forget and that is bouncing back to her? Although these remains of the past are the only ones to reassure us, they are so familiar.

«Very often, I have this strong desire to return to my mother's womb and to find tranquillity and warmth that seem to me so difficult to find on Earth,» says Huyn Jou Lee. Then, realizing how this dream is absurd, she tries to compress space and time on canvas hoping that it would lead her to a better future.

Montreal, 1999