Be Friends with Your Burning...., Transitional Works by Hyung Mo Lee

Hyung Mo Lee's practice reflects many of the aesthetic and philosophic strategies associated with the Italian Arte Povera (literally poor art) movement whose artists attacked corporate mentality with an art of unconventional materials and style, often incorporating found objects in their works. Lee's drawings, sculptures, and installations are notable for their radical choice of materials and emphasis on laborious, time-consuming process. His Sumi Ink drawings, both delicate and dynamic, are meditations on geologic time - strata rendered brush-stroke by brush-stroke - while sculptural works expand on lessons learned from drawing. Found objects are negotiated to the point of transformation, often bordering on dissolution, always stressing materiality and physicality, evocative of myth over scientific rationalism.

The title of the Show, Be Friends with your Burning is from a poem by Rumi. 

The following is an exerpt:

                   "...I don't hear the words
            That broken-open lowliness is the reality,
            not the language! Forget phraseology.
            I want burning, 'burning'.
            Be friends 
            with your burning. Burn up your thinking 
            and your forms of expression!..."

Artist Statement regarding the show:

 Primarily, I would like to show wall works, new stuff I've been working on since my return from Spain. In these works, I'm using a paintbrush which I've not used in many years. It's a drawing practice, back to basics, a practice that will lead to, I would think, a larger scope of what's to come from practice. The works are somewhat figurative, abstract scrawls, and clumpy gooey sculptural materials slopped onto paper that make them very textured. It's transitional work, not fully formed yet a starting ground. The feel coincides with my recent move to San Pedro as well as my return from Spain of which the memory still resonates strongly and it's full effect not yet sorted and unrealized. I feel moved, literally and figuratively, transposed. And in this state of mind I want to burn up my personal history and the lessons learned that reside within and make work with a renewed, fresh, novel, even a naive mind.