Eun Young Lee

I have been painting nature for the last few years. I paint mountains, forests, rivers, beaches, the places that seem to be somewhere, but at the same time, I want them to look as if they don’t exist anywhere.
Nature is a mystery for me. Beautiful, weird, always there but constantly changing. I grew up in the countryside, a small village in South Korea which is surrounded by small mountains and fields and that’s pretty much all there is. I spent a lot of time looking closely at plants and insects. It felt curious, strange. Time seemed to flow very slowly.
Now I’m living and working in southern Germany. I often go and visit lakes and forests at the foot of the Alps. Standing in the coniferous forest filled with unfamiliar trees which don’t grow in my hometown, I often think of the home forest on the other side of the earth. It feels foreign and at home simultaneously.
Take something that looks all perfect and beautiful at a glance. Looking closely, things begin to shimmer and crack. It is a game I have been playing since I was a child, searching for this strange spot, the crack through which I can take a peek into a different place. The places in my painting like the swimming pool, beach, and secret garden become elements for me to play with, connect and disconnect, put together and tear apart. They have real locations but exist outside of the real world, as Foucault said of Heterotopia, as a physical approximation of the imaginary utopia.
I want my paintings to be a pathway to an ambiguous place, an undefinable place, a place in between. I imagine this strange and mysterious world made up of many thin layers, which is both inside and outside. Ordinary and extraordinary. Fleeting and eternal. I paint.