SARA LEE

 Since Lee Sara made her debut as an artist, she has been painting girl dolls with looks reflecting indifferent or ambiguous feelings. Her doll paintings with highly realistic expression and classical composition attracted the attention of the art world and her name became widely known. Since then, she has been carrying out active artistic activities through a great deal of gallery exhibitions and art collaboration with enterprises. Her works manifest philosophy-combining painting with a history of ideas or cultural history in terms of style as well as traces influenced by Pop art and hyperrealism. On the other hand, she expresses a more colorful and optimistic world through the canvas composed and filled with numerous objects. In particular, her works of this exhibition constitute plane (2D) images, which are incomparable with her previous works. 

She still sticks to exquisite coloring and drawing equal to the previous works. However, in terms of figuration, they reminds us of festivals and carnivals for they are composed of a variety of forms from her memory. All images with repeated scratches are combined with absolutely bright and complex forms. After coloring, she creates her wished images and texture by scratching the completely dry surface with a sharp needle. The scratch process requires balance of mind beyond mere techniques or labor. The process of making forms and patterns by drawing lines through scratching looks like that of embroidering based on a needle and thread. The surface of canvas is covered with rugged texture created by strands of the fabric, and the artist fills the uneven texture with paint to make a smoother and more even surface. By scratching on top of it, she makes rugged and uneven texture. This newly created ruggedness fills the entire surface of the work and represents like a skin embracing the body of the painting. This process of scratching complex and complicated figurations and splendorous colors one by one reminds us of that of inlaying the surface of ceramics in diverse colors and forms. The thinnest relief or etching and painting are constituted in symbols, signs and patterns, and assimilate each other with delicacy. They are the surface and images with extreme concentration of sense, labor and immersion. 

Sara Lee’s figure work “Lucky bear” represents dolls in her childhood memory. Dolls may have comprehensive meaning. Babies feel comfort, happiness and satisfaction with their toy friends. Now dolls transformed into ‘Lucky bear“ in her art works. The image of “Lucky bear” provides us a kind of charm or more like guardian angel. She hopes that children can fly to the wonder land full of dreams and happiness and adults can look back their once innocent world with lovely work “Lucky bear“.