SingartContinuing A Korean Homage to Nature
Lee Gil-Rae’s “Pine Tree”. Photo credit: Opera Gallery Singapore.
Lee Gil-Rae has always been fascinated with nature. And in the early years of this millenium, he has translated his appreciation of the original form into his highly popular fruits and vegetables – capturing their essence in snapshot-likeness.
Yet his new and so latest series of copper sculptures pays homage to nature on a totally other plane: Lee has drawn upon its vitality and metaphorically condensed it into his ethereal pine trees.
His success in this distillation can be attributed to the intensive weaving technique he has deployed to sculpt the massive coniferous trunks – getting an outcome that winningly replicates their rough crack-rippled barks and spritely needles in vivid texture and realistic colour and form; so formulating a pictorial plasticity of the dynamic vitality of living organisms in general.
That he is able to beautifully blend nature’s reality with his artistic sensibility boils down to what makes Lee and his country of birth essentially Korean. And the timeless pine tree, which puts down roots in every mountain and stream in his part of East Asia, encapsulates both – Lee strongly believes that its vitality is a symbol of nature itself. It is also a subject of Korean, and therefore his, reasoning and spirituality – an indulgence in Oriental misen-en-scene that expands a natural-environment-friendly vision.
Not surprisingly then that his sculpted pine trees are not exact replicas of what grows most naturally in Korea. In Lee’s mind, they grow in a twisting, twirling and curling of forms that bespoke of the magic and wonder of living in an angelic Korea.
To ensure that he sculpts his pine trees in ways that befit his stunning imagination, Lee has first to draw a blueprint of his sculpture, with all its intricate details and branching maneuvers – drafting into this road map all his expansively implosive emotions. Only then does he think about the practicalities of crafting his creation.
Just like his subject matter, his choice of materials with which he translates his inspirations into reality is similarly catalyzed by the natural world. During his pre-fruit-and-vegetable sculpture days, his forages resulted in art works created with soil, stone and even marsh snail. And it was back-breakingly laborious work scouring his beloved country for these rare materials. Using them to create aesthetically pleasing pieces of art proved a great technical challenge as well.
It, therefore, does not come as a great surprise that Lee only came into his very artistic element when he chanced upon a revelation: driving behind a truck loaded with copper pipes one day, he was suddenly struck by how its load of tightly bound-up pipes looked like a lived-in and presently used bee-hive. And this man-made mimicry of nature inspired him to begin cutting copper pipes into ultra-slim rings to weld together as units of cells crafting his sculptures.
Moreover, he chooses to weld rather than use small rings to clip the copper rings together as it achieves an organic harmonization of the cells – just like the individual cells that make up life are cohesively and organically gelled into a unified whole. This he brilliantly achieves with his vegetable and fruit sculptures.
However, the ingenuity of Lee’s workmanship is further tested with his decision to use these copper rings to formulate the complexity of his pine trees. They have first to be slightly flattened and reshaped with a hammer for fashioning in exact mimicry the rough texture of their almost abrasive-like trunks. Or the pipes have to be cut into strips to represent the smoother younger branches and the twig-like needles.
Next, he corrodes the copper with a special chemical solution till he gets the perfect shade of extremely mature brown for the trunk, the lighter more youthful brown for the slender branches and energetically glamorous green for the extremely slim needles.
Then and only then does he weld all the different copper parts together into a delightful replica of his beloved pine trees, and so succinctly depict in artistic reality the Korean psyche for their natural surroundings.
Behold Lee’s latest ethereal pine trees at Opera Gallery Singapore, 2 Orchard Turn, #03-05 ION Orchard, Singapore 238801.
