SEOUL, b. 1996

Lee Sanoh (b. 1996) moves fluidly between Eastern painting and ceramics, pursuing a practice unconfined by fixed forms and free to unfold its own narrative. Stories that began with earlier works — rooted in the experience of losing her grandmother and a sustained attention to fragile, neglected subjects — expanded into a spiritual dimension upon encountering the symbolic image of the bird. Lee Sanoh's practice originates from the moment of witnessing the death of a beloved. During a period when her artistic sensitivity to life and death was deepening, the artist began writing poetry as a way of reckoning with presence and absence. These self-written poems, set down in pencil, naturally extended into drawn works, and she found herself drawn into the sensation of pencil on paper — the way it rose like dry, crumbling smoke. Through material explorations of pencil and colored pencil, and across themes of life and death, flight and fall, what remained at the end of these life-cycle meditations was the bird as messenger. It is both an emissary connecting this world and the next, and a mediating presence that brings inspiration to the artist. The spiritual and mythological resonance of the bird, the aesthetic of symmetry visible in its structural form, and the texture and shape latent in the grain of its wings all evoke the balance that humans endlessly pursue, and the sensation of life's soaring and falling. In ≪Fading, Rising≫, Lee Sanoh introduces verdigris — obtained by oxidizing copper — as a primary pigment. Copper is a biometal that quietly performs its role within the metabolism of living organisms, including humans, while simultaneously being a material that rusts over time. When pure red copper reacts with oxygen in the air and the surface turns a reddish-brown, the artist introduces an oxidizing agent to further corrode the copper, producing the blue-green hue of verdigris. Through repeated cycles of oxidation and corrosion — sanding the surface down and building up layers again — paintings in the traditional hwajodo (flower-and-bird) genre emerge: hills and trees suggestive of burial mounds, orioles and pasque flowers encountered by chance at her grandmother's cemetery. The verdigris spreading across the surface in blue-green — the actual elemental constituents of living things translated into the visual art of painting — functions as a medium through which creation and dissolution are made visible. Just as copper rusts and acquires new color, Lee Sano regards death not as an ending but as one stage within a cycle, imagining a world in which all that has disappeared continues to live on in other forms.