Sohyong Lee

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Exhibitions Images and Recordings: View.

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Recent Exhibition:

January 25 – March 1, 2025. Winter. Los Angeles (4478).

(paradise)

Sohyong Lee, Rudik Ovsepyan, Danica Ribi, santoni kina, Keywan Tafteh, Tiago Da Cruz

+ Reference: Checklist.

+ Release: File.

+ Press: This Week’s Must-See Art (Curate LA: February 20-26, 2025).

+ Exhibition Documentation: View.

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Bio

Sohyong Lee (b. Chun Cheon, Korea) is a multidisciplinary artist who primarily works with sculpture, video, and installation. She received an MFA in Art-Integrated Media from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA in Sculpture from the College of Art & Design, EWHA Womans University. Sohyong has shown her work at Cevera Yoon Gallery(CA), UTA Artist Space LA (CA), The Reef (CA), EWHA Art Gallery (Seoul, KR), Gallery Well (Seoul, KR), GyeomJae JeongSeon Art Museum (Seoul, KR), UM Gallery (Seoul, KR),  Yihyung Art Center (Seoul, KR), Kosa Space Gallery (Seoul, KR). Her work has been featured in Voyage LA Local Stories. She works and lives in Los Angeles, California.

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As a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture and installation, I explore the visualization of subtle, momentary nature of the mundane, or in other words the daily instances that elude our habitual and linguistic perceptions. My work illuminates volatile ideas that hover at the edge of consciousness within the complexity of an ever-changing world, engaging in a contemplative examination of ungraspable senses we often overlook in daily experience.

By sustaining attention to the seemingly mundane things, each observation, however small they may be, becomes a catalyst for a deeper exploration. – An unexpected contrast, a trace of thoughts that reside in fleeting moments and how those nuances are transcribed through our mind. – Those inquiries are translated into a visual vocabulary through various techniques and modalities including molding, casting, crafting, integration of found objects, video, projection, and interactive coding. Through creating analogical relationships, I create intersections that initiate unfamiliar dialogue with the familiar, where fleeting moments find their visual voice in minimal, poetic forms that suggest rather than a declaration. Through this contemplative approach, I seek a pathway to revisit the fleeting nature of perception itself, reflecting on the significance of the profound impact of unnoticed facets of life, and guiding us toward an unexpected territory of insight, a renewed relationship with the ordinary.

{c.01/25/2025. Biographical text courtesy of the artist.}

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[A Note on Longing Shadows (2023). Included in (paradise) .]

We first saw Sohyong’s work at the inaugural group exhibition at Cevera Yoon gallery (a two-level, multi-room space in the historic Granada building announcing the edge of Koreatown/Downtown). Under the stairwell there was an amber-brown cube dodging an elongated, rectangular shadow that receded just enough toward infinity to host a stillness so at its limits that it also looked-like it might be moving at the speed of light. An object lingering at its event horizon, just about to dis/appear. We moved towards it: inside the cast resin cube are shreds of a dictionary.

Between the shadow and the shreds there was a sense of something present but inaccessible, like seeing something out of the corner of my eye—at a periphery—while looking directly at it. The shadow and the shreds (the fragments) show clear but distorted traces of the thing they use to be—the body they left behind (while remaining part of it).

Once we saw more of Sohyong’s work in her studio we realized that these relations between fragmentation, memory, repetition, image, and text form a gauzy, hovering language that reappear in various phases in each of her pieces. An intimate, almost too-near-to-see language of in-betweens and unresolved states. Her piece “Longing Shadows” that is included in “ (paradise) “ is a crystal of this language. With a tiny video looping backward-and-forward tucked into a repeated image of a desert-landscape, there is an atavistic cycle of time where I can only return to somewhere I was already. First I see it through the glass front that reminds me of a window in my grandmother’s house, then I see it doubled inside this partially-ajar wooden box that forces me to peversely peer at the image from the side. A partial few, a repeating image, a recurring recording, and a fleeting reality that I can look away from but can’t escape. And all this from an advertisement: my reality is bought and sold each time I look.

—80

<< In the artwork, the image is repeatedly displayed and the video is looped back and forth, representing the repetition of fragmentary images in memory. […] The image in the artwork is a screenshot from a video taken while following a truck. In the video, the shadow of trees along the roadside is repeatedly cast and disappears on the advertisement- a landscape photo ad- on the back of the truck, where the artist experiences the discrepancy between images and fleeting reality. >> (SL)

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Exhibitions with the Gallery: