Lee Chong Ja's recent works 'throb' in series

 

 With her solo exhibition in New York just ahead, a master painter Lee Chong Ja's recent works have been creating a sensation, especially in her style as well as the method of treating subjects.
 While her former works had been treated by the method of combining the tempting representational painting with the strong abstract painting, her recent works have shown a marked trend to combine these styles with the 'objet' .
 Her romantic memories derived from her own experiences have been reflected in the vivid works of 'chlidren's play' and the brilliant scenes of 'Dances' both at home and abroad.
 The motif of her recent works is to introduce Korean traditional artistic skill by using 'cloth pieces' into the abstract painting.  The artist has made small canvases, which were able to contain traditional patterns and exotic 'cloth pieces' .  with using these pieces she could establish the abstract feeling in the paintings.
 Though they seems to be easy works in the eyes of onlookers, they are not easy to make on the part of the painter as the cloth pieces function as the heterogeneous elements in the paintings.  However, Lee has overcome this obstacle by combining the materials with the line drawing to realize her own conception.
 Lee gave them the name of ' Throp' . Moreover, she studied the additional methods to correspond with the former methods she already developed. her new method is to catch the interesting, exciting and momentary atmosphere of the daily life's perfume such as the traditional wedding , birthday party, and so on.
 Lee succeeds in giving the lookers the special exciting atmospheres by using these formative elements of the small cloth pieces on the canvass, which is enlarging her own subject.  In fact, she could not only represent the national spirit in each painting, but also combine the realism with the abstraction, the tradition with the contemporary and the spirit with the 'objet ' .

By Park ki Woong (Doctor of Fine Arts)