스킵네비게이션

In One Drop of Water Are Found All The Secrets of All The Oceans, 2019, Plastic bottles, water, dye, light, 200ｘ2000ｘ1500cm

LEE Changjin

In One Drop of Water Are Found All The Secrets of All The Oceans

❑ artist bio

 Lee Changjin was born in 1979 in Busan, lives and works in Busan. He is currently participating in Art Distric_P at Busan Gumsa-dong as resident artist after he got Ma in Arts and BA in Sculpture from Busan University. He works mainly with installation and also uses other mediums such as sculpture, photograph, etc. He participated in Myanmar’s non-profit, New Zero Art Space’s international residence program in 2013 and exhibited at White Building, Phnom Penh with the support from Busan Cultural Foundation’s Korea-Cambodia Cultural Exchange Program in 2014. He has participated group exhibitions at Incheon Shinsegae Gallery and Busan Nakdonggang Culture Center and continue his practice actively both in Korea and abroad.

❑ introduction

The artist observes the basic principles exist in human’s surroundings and how they work in his daily lives. He also studies them in order to express in visual form. He focuses on discovering things that seem to be hidden due to their familiarity to human. This corresponds to the context he applied for his earlier ceramic works and abstract sculptures. He excavates phenomena and objects that we are not yet recognized and give them forms to present for his audience. Such practice often begin from trivial experiences. Exemplar case is Water always find it’s way series that he continues till today since its start in Cambodia in 2014. This work is consist of hundreds of recycled water bottles suspended from the ceiling in which colored water’s surface in the bottles are perfectly aligned on a same height in order to invoke the audience to think about what they see before their eyes and what is behind it. Since 2019, the artist focuses more on the visual changes made by colors and materials. In his solo exhibition entitled, Somewhat Lyrical Landscape and A Color Chart That Isn’t at Art District_P, he presented Color is only beautiful when it means nothing (2019) that would provide him with unique data foundational for his future works as he created his own color chart with water and ink mix in rows of same sized bottles.

Continuing his study on level and color, the artist presents work advanced one step further for 2019 Sea Art festival. Water and color still play a role as main material here while 8,000 pet bottles against backdrop of sea line talk about balance and harmony. If he has made refined, perfect horizontal lines until now, In One Drop Of Water Are Found All The Secrets Of All The Oceans (2019) draws attention to free forms in the open space of a beach. Diverse colors in the work appear shifted or distorted by the changing lights as the time passes during day time, and show stronger flows by the artificial light when night comes. The title, ‘in one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans’ seems to give voices to those which human does not recognize about the nature or ignore. While human might want to ignore mundane objects they use without discretion because they touch human uneasy conscience, they reflect back who we are today as they are beautifully packaged and placed in front of nature.