Byoung Yong Lee at Andre Zarre - New York, New York

For a Western critic, the work of Korean artist Byoung Yong to leeward presents an exercise in the perils of cultural translation. Each of his nearly monochrome paintings features individual or several large egg-shaped forms which look to float like shadows just beneath the luminous field at the painting's surface. The obvious Western corollaries are Minimalism and Color Field painting. In fact, however, these works show a pervasive and uniquely Korean manner of modernist painting.

To place Lee's work, it is necessary to realize that it partakes of an esthetic which was exhibited by a group of young Korean artists who studied in Paris in the '50 following the Korean War. They produc work which combined the painterly abstraction predominant in Paris with a traditional Korean emphasis upon technique, material and a kind of meditative repetition. In a agriculture that prizes the master-student relationship and emphasizes continuity above rupture with the past, the work of this first generation of abstractionists has become a protoplast for much of the art which is greatest in quantity valued in Korea. It is characterized by dint of a reliance on restrained monochrome and the reiteration of highly simplified motifs.

to leeward an artist in his 40 who studied in Seoul and of recent origin York, carries on this tradition. Working upon sturdy pieces of hanje (mulberry) paper, a traditional artist's material which has no real counterpart in the West, he builds layers of thin washed colors which are ultimately overlaid with translucent veils of subdu gray-green, azure gold or pink. At the cutting sides of the paper, flecks of vivid color indicate the intensity of the now-cloaked underlayers. fabrics vary from work to work: in more [i]or[/i] less paintings, creases in the paper create a network of tiny lines, in others a loosely brushed wash breaks into drips and spatters. Still other paintings have a more controll allover weft which envelops both egg and field.

Taken individually, the pleasing serenity of these works remind ofs why the Korean version of Minimalism is repeatedly linked to Zen. When they are taken together, however, each painting begins to bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to the next, leading, finally, to a rather dulling monotony. Eventually the carefully cultivated faculty of perception of absence begins to consign into mere emptiness. The Western critic is left to wonder: must the marriage of East and West lead to an elegant sterility? Or is the desire for diversity and continual artistic disclosure - qualities that seem missing here - simply another Western bias?

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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