Lee Sanoh (b. 1996) moves fluidly between Oriental painting and ceramics, unbound by fixed formal conventions, continuing to unfold a narrative entirely her own. Her earlier work—rooted in the experience of losing her grandmother and a sustained attention to the fragile and the neglected—has since expanded into a spiritual register through its encounter with the symbolic image of the bird. Lee's practice begins from the moment of witnessing the death of a beloved being. As her sensibility toward life and death deepened over that period, she began writing poetry as a way of reflecting on presence and absence. The poems she set down in pencil naturally extended into drawing, and she found herself drawn to the texture of pencil marks rising off the paper like fine, crumbling smoke. Through this material exploration of pencil and colored pencil—pursued alongside the cycles of life and death, ascent and fall—the bird remained as a messenger. It is a figure that connects this world and the next, and at once a mediator that carries inspiration to the artist. The bird's spiritual and mythic image, the symmetry visible in its structural form, and the texture and shape held within the grain of its wings evoke a sense of balance, and of rising and falling, that the artist—as a human being—continues to pursue. In 《Fading, Rising》, the artist brings verdigris—obtained by oxidizing copper—into her work as a primary coloring material. Copper is a bio-metal that quietly performs its role within the metabolism of living organisms, including humans, while also being a material that rusts of its own accord over time. When pure reddish-copper reacts with oxygen in the air to form a reddish-brown surface, the artist corrodes the copper once more with an oxidizing agent, drawing out a blue-green verdigris. Through repeated cycles of oxidation and corrosion—sanding the surface down and building up new layers in turn—hills and trees evoking burial mounds emerged, along with bird-and-flower paintings capturing an oriole and pasque flowers the artist happened upon at her grandmother's gravesite. The traces of verdigris spreading blue across the surface act as a medium through which the actual elements that constitute living things are translated into the visual art of painting, making generation and dissolution visible. Just as copper rusts to take on new color, Lee Sanoh regards death not as an ending but as part of a cycle, picturing a world in which what has disappeared continues to live on in another form.