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ART: THE FIELD OF SUBTRACTION |
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| Lee Sun-Don is a talented painter born in Taiwan, a creative writer, a classical music composer, a self-taught pianist and an advanced chess player. He is a man and an all-round artist, who practices mind-awakening aesthetics through an artistic approach that aims to develop the viewer's spiritual enlightenment and massage the atrophied muscle of collective contemplation, thus delivering society from a merely spectacular concept of beauty. Lee Sun-Don proposes an exhibition in progress entitled "Create & Change: Internal = External, 1=∞" , which is a multimedia synthesis of all art |
 Prof. Lee Sun-Don and Prof. Achille Bonito Oliva(right) |
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languages from traditional to conceptual art. The exhibition aims to develop an interactive relationship with the viewer in order to spread universal harmony through the cosmic energy generated by artwork signs, the artist's performance and the viewer's contemplation.
The exhibition space will be arranged as an on-site studio displaying 40-50 unfinished canvasses, either with base colours or unfinished images. So the project is a work in progress: the artist will create paintings impromptu during the exhibition.
The core of the entire exhibition will be not only to emphasise a complete presentation of the creation process, but also to show and share an unprecedented creative path through Lee Sun-Don's own Buddhist achievements. Moreover, the spatial arrangement of the artworks in the exhibition site will change continuously. The creative process will be entirely recorded by a video camera and projected in the exhibition area.
Besides Lee Sun-Don's personal impromptu performance art, the exhibition will also aim to achieve "1=∞" (Infinity)! During the entire exhibition, the video camera will be set up for on-site assistants to interview visitors and record their statements on their feelings and thoughts after viewing the artworks. In this way, even if the artist completes an entire painting, the interviews and recordings made during the exhibition period will continue to create a unique performance! That is to say, the artist himself as "1" will develop and interact with viewers as "∞" (Infinity) to convey the idea of "1=∞".
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| The main constant of Lee Sun-Don's painting is his two-dimensional space arrangement that inhibits perspective depth while subtracting material thickness, unlike informal art, which developed at the same time as abstract art. His two-dimensional space transfers painting to a state of pure visibility, a specific and self-evident condition governed by rules based on optical perception alone, without any illusive depth or reference outside the image. |
 wakening / The Dragon Roaming across the Universe (2) |
 Mr. Hello / The King of Dharma Guardian, 3 (Greeting the Wind in the Woods) |
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Lee Sun-Don arranges his pictorial space in order to show the structure of his painting, which is made of a medium, a surface and a network of signs. Owing to the lack of depth, signs come to the fore on the horizontal line in the two-dimensional space. However, space is not a quantitatively inert dimension, a static measurement or a mere container. In this case, it is a field, a mobile system of relationships that instantaneously play with signs.
Within the notion of field, as we learn from science, space can fluctuate, surface can breathe and spread throughout with an internal mobility that develops according to the dynamics, combination and scattering of signs. Signs vibrate in a floating dimension. No centres or peripheries can be determined: in order to be defined, they would require a static quality, which is lacking. Thanks to the two-dimensional space, the field can continuously explore the potentials of connections and their formal flexibility.
Lee Sun-Don reproduces this mobile concept of field by abolishing spatial depth and pushing his language to the proliferating condition of an organic state where signs are tied, untied and freed from any form of paralysing geometry. Nearness and distance, foreground and background no longer exist: there is only total simultaneous interpenetration. The goal is achieved by introducing a colour, black, that enables the space to appear according to the characters of uniformity. Black is the feature of a space that does not want to play the main role in the representation. Instead, it tends to push it towards an optical and perceptive integration into its system of signs. Signs are white, but they are not contrasting; they are rather woven together. This fabric made of white signs on a black surface governs the image, which acquires the ambiguity of a rhythm where one cannot say whether black results from white contours or white results from a discontinuous black path. Ambiguity of vision comes from the organic rhythm of signs following an unpredictable but constant motion. The polarity of motion is regulated by a double tension: repetition and difference. The former sets a sort of sign-generating matrix, which starts from a basic structure to obtain repetition. The latter promotes the proliferation of signs, which change according to organic dynamics that recall natural biological growth rhythms. |
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 Blessing 3 / Wonder Affinity, Converging Benevolence |
 Awakening / I'm Riding on the Wind (14) |
A subtracting intention guides the hand of the artist as well as the contemplative drive of the artwork, which appears in the ambiguity of a chromatic interlacement where only a continuous intersection can be perceived together with the vague impression that signs result from a cut in space and space results from an irregular path of signs. Contemplation itself is directed by this subtracting intention, the unsteady feeling of continuous crossings between the two elements that deprive them of their unity and integrity. | |
| Lee Sun-Don is not afraid to take away because even a subtracting intention can reveal in a more intensive manner the portion hidden and subtracted from the eye. Subtracting also means memorising and accumulating the idea of a thickness subtracted from the surface. Painting necessarily has the character of a resplendent superficial nature, which does not mean superficiality, but rather the acceptance of the specific and structural nature of painting that, historically and laically, tends to overcome perspective illusionism. The reference to Matisse and Art Nouveau, to their tendency to act always on joyful and docile surfaces through a sign that entangles without creating thickness or swelling, but still wishing to convey the impression of an open and relentless flow, is self-evident. However, the sign of Lee Sun-Don does not reject its overlapping presence. On the contrary, it builds on this abrupt overlapping and, through condensation, makes the surface denser in some points and looser elsewhere. Subtracting does not entail an irreparable loss, but a temporary removal, a discontinuous presence of signs that reaffirms the specific quality of the concept of field construed as a continuous dynamic operation. The sign appears and disappears. The space creates and disintegrates, condenses and tears, while keeping its two-dimensional consistency. The black colour produces uniformity and absorption of the white rhythm, which is the result of a kind of siege of the sign against itself. The work of Lee Sun-Don is based on a structuralist culture from which it draws the conception of structure as construed by Lévi-Strauss, that is a continuously reproducing constant. However, development and temporality offer this reproduction the opportunity for a simultaneous production of differences. The white sign takes shapes that comply with its inherent nature, but at the same time opens to organic variations and mutations, although these mutations always fall within the original genetic code. Variations encompass the expansive freedom of Arp's and Mirò's shapes, the sense of correspondence of Kandinskij's forms and the underground swarming of Klee's signs, although without their background of animism. The spirit of liberty tends to shift the accent towards the organicity of nature, the profound forces that govern its motion. Balla is combined with surrealism, but all references are absorbed by the autonomy of the image at the crossing point of many cultural climates. The simultaneous influence of post-World War II abstract art and informal art increases the complexity of his work, which sucks into the image the incontrovertible cultural proximity of Mathieu and Tobey with Zen. However, the difference with the Mathieu is self-evident, as Sun-Don prefers a non-static, non-decanted sign that does not evoke magic immobility, but rather tends to motion and interlacement. Perhaps, there is a higher affinity with Tobey, the sense of infinite pulsation, a temporal continuum that supports the composition as a whole. Tobey's American culture, also pervaded by a Zen spirit, leads him to an image that identifies with the space itself. The sign is the symptom par excellence of motion, an infinitesimal and impalpable motion. Unlike Tobey, the sign of Lee Sun-Don does not tend to spread throughout the space, to occupy it and to identify with it. It tends to condense, to pile up, to cross and to overlap. In short, it tends to subtract its presence through its own presence. | |||
| Once again, this is the subtracting approach, probably deeply rooted in Eastern culture, through which the artist creates labyrinths and fragments of signs, a writing that reaches the qualitative heights of calligraphy, a peculiar and clearly recognisable visual inflection. Recognisability is the consequence of the structuralist attitude to language, which always tends to return to its original position and take the shapes determined by the curve. |
 Awakening / Holy Land -- Dunhuang (13) |
 Awakening / I Am Butterfly (24) |
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The organic proliferation of the sign is kept within the two dimensions of the pictorial surface that does not abandon itself to the pleasure of matter, a temptation that informal art could not resist. Lee Sun-Don wishes to represent the vital impulse of the world without the naturalistic verisimilitude of some informal experiences and move towards a perceptive objectivity of vision that only implies the organ of sight. Hence, the need for calligraphy and not for writing, which usually also entails psychological inflections.
Signs have their internal light, sustained also by the monochromatic black background: white on black, not black on white as for writing. At the same time, signs are not characterised in figurative terms. They keep their lively iconicity and figural absence, which probably results from Lee Sun-Don's cultural roots. The network recalls the cadence of some Chinese ceramics, a sense of decoration as pure representation and spatial scansion. The Eastern culture that animates Sun-Don's sign enables the image to convey a sense of life and, at the same time, the idea of a concrete measure. The whole composition is supported by a sort of abstract-concrete substance that is never metaphoric, but is always sustained by its inherent autonomy. In this case, autonomy means the capacity of vision to adapt, according to inherent laws, to the image itself. A meta-historical rule supports the image, which always tends to return to the structure of its original sign. Finally and paradoxically, the composition is also governed by chance, which means that interlacements do not result from a predetermined rhythm. They follow the internal evolution of signs, halting if necessary before their figurative degeneration. Owing to their inner bearing structure, the combinations of signs always fall within an indefinitely self-reproducible genetic code. |
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 Treasure Vessels (1) |
The labyrinth can therefore reproduce itself according to families of signs deriving from the same type, the same original matrix, which enables them to coexist at a close distance. And this closeness also determines their resemblance, an abstract eroticism that paves the way to possible specular reproduction. However, in this case, specularity does not mean unconcerned reproduction, but rather regulation of the birth and growth of signs according to the same rules. The hand is driven by the matrix that assimilates the system of signs and dictates their formation. Syntax is conditioned by the need for calligraphy, the need for their appearance according to a particular visual inflection. | ||
| The sign incorporates both fullness and emptiness according to a cadence that is continuously balanced by additions and subtractions. In this case, adding means introducing fragments of light on the dark surface of the painting, whereas subtracting means bringing back light to its original condition of spatial darkness. The two dimensions ensure a constant balance of light and darkness values in fast simultaneous exchanges within the composition. Mobile forces in space produce in turn the birth of constellations without a centre. The principle of birth lies in the absence of a centre, because a centre would also imply the principle of death and the end of motion. In this way, Lee Sun-Don has achieved perpetual temporality in his work, outside any before-after sequence. The network of signs now develops beyond temporal ineluctability and necessities, while still tending to establish the project of its final immobility. In this sense, the sign of Lee Sun-Don is organic in that it has created within it the principle of its perpetual regeneration, which is typical of nature. | |||
| Perpetuity is not the artist's intent, but rather the nature of the sign itself, which is based on the structure of contiguity. Contiguity enables the sign to proliferate around itself, encouraged by the absence of internal spatial depth. Hence, it can slide above and close within an unyielding compact chromatic dimension. The image is compact yet, at the same time, mobile, ready to affirm its organic tension and keep the internal memory of its fragmented structure, and this structure gives the composition a lightness that makes it fly beyond its natural medium. Then, Lee Sun-Don adopts transparencies and spatial media that enable the image to cross other dimensions, such as daily life. The fragments of signs accelerate their sliding process and become even fainter and less overlapping. Like scales, they suggest their presence and prepare to cross the painting along its main direction. |
 Dragon of Auspiciousness / Wealth, Nobility, and Auspiciousness |
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The two dimensions become increasingly thinner, also owing to the transparent nature of the medium, for a double reading of the work. Regeneration of signs occurs simultaneously, from both directions, according to a spatial relativity that also becomes temporal. Light results from the material itself that dematerialises the presence of signs, bringing them to a state of impalpable consistency and lightness.
Acceleration becomes even more visible. However, it is not a mimesis of motion; it is the capacity of the sign to reproduce according to a scattered pattern in space and convey a sense of dynamism through its own crushing. Lee Sun-Don does not refer to real actions. He recalls dynamics resulting from the nature of the medium and its combination with the sign. The sign flies away; yet it is always anchored to the transparent surface, ready to establish a relationship of integration with the environment, an instance that can also find Zen references.
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