KIWHA LEE

MONTI8 is excited to announce the exhibition ‘Reverse Universe’, the first European solo show of Korean-American artist Kiwha Lee (b. Seoul, Korea; lives and works in New York). The exhibition presents a body of new works, twelve paintings to be hung in both venues of the gallery: the space in Latina—which will present eight small and larger works, and the new project space in Rome—opening its inaugural show featuring a smaller selection of paintings specifically created for the space. Lee reimagines and reinvents various ancient Asian printmaking processes from craft or “material culture” traditions rooted in objects and architecture but with oil paint on canvas. She credits her distinct voice and vision to her lifelong transcultural upbringing and study across four continents—Australia, America, Europe, Asia. She writes, “Painting is a construct borne of cultural imagination” and its main role in society over the past millennia has been to illuminate and “expand perception”. She offers a new alternative framework through which to see painting—a departure from easel painting’s “painting as window” and casts rather decoratively-mediated light from the outside/backside of the painting into the space of the viewer.
Her paintings resemble jaali—the ornamental, latticed architectural stone screen that functioned as a window for centuries in the non-West, thereby making pattern a powerful narrative tool not only in the creation of deep space (as pattern was historically associated with flatness and decoration) but also a subversive agent in either camouflaging or drawing attention to “characters”. Lee seeks to establish a new approach to abstraction—not relying on conventions like linear perspective or modelling but rather reshaping and expanding Western pictorial hierarchy with the exclusive use of pattern, color and shape alone.