Forever Moving

Ukn Lee – Forever Moving

It is not on the side lines of this life and the canvas, that the stories can be created if we watch life only on its surface. Only in a sincere moment in one smallest of the moment of meditation my dear art lovers, the life may move us to what we all can see. And in this very moment the art begins.

UNDER THE MANGO TREE is pleased to present „Moving forever“, a selection of new and some old works of Ukn Lee. Early works on rice paper have a natural flow of color and movement integrated through the brushstrokes that each work is a complete story in itself – yet connected to each other as explorable stages of „Loving“.

The early death of his natural mother has had a decisive impact on Ukn Lees work. One often observes a recurrence of a woman´s figure in his works from 1990´s and it continues in an abstract form. The lady half covered with strokes of color – holds a watermelon in hand- or a grown up child held upside down by a woman figure – are narratives of his Asian background and the process of growing up alone.

Some dialogs happen only in silence. A conversation between the artist and the canvas seems to have been recorded in the portrait of his mother, as a memory that is large than life. People come together on his canvases in small groups as if led by an invisible hand, passing by and then drifting apart. His canvases speak of a movement of time in which one is confronted with the present and also the forever. As life itself.

Ukn Lee was born in 1963 and has studied painting in Seoul, Kiel and Braunschweig. A disciple and a Meisterschüler of Prof. Norbert Thadeuz, he lives and paints now in Berlin and Seoul.