"New York State of Mind" Art Exhibit - East and West Merge w/ Iconography

Widely recognized in Asia, Gil Woo Lee was most recently awarded the Grand Prize at the 14th Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh 2010. In his Grand Prize winning piece on display, Dance in Nature Monroe, influential Pop Art memories are superimposed with a traditional Asian dancer expressing an East-West dialogue on American and Asian culture.

Themes to expect: Michael Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Andy Warhol; ancient Asian landscapes and Manhattan cityscapes. The exhibition, “New York State of Mind”, literally merges ancient Naturalist Asian philosophy and modern New York City pop culture mythology.

These works reference the teaching of the Taoist philosophers Laotzu and Chungtze as they derive from the precept that it is our human nature to dance.

"New York State of Mind offers the most complete distillation of Gil Woo Lee's ideas about the fusion of cultures. Here he brings together images that speak of his own contradictory experiences of a world that oscillates between western materialism, celebrity worship, and commercialism on one hand and an older Asian ideal of spirituality, contemplation and love of nature on the other. Jagged urban skylines meld with traditional Asian landscapes, while larger than life figures like New York's Mayor Bloomberg, Michael Jackson and Andy Warhol lose definition as they are treated to the artists dissolving technique. As the title suggests, this show is meant to present a "New York State of Mind", but it is a New York of imagination, not fact."
- Eleanor Heartney

ARTIST STATEMENTS:
“One day in the autumn of 2003 while painting at my studio in Seoul, I looked up towards the sky and noticed that the Gingko leaves seemed to be burning with fire in the reflection of the white sky. This intense visual experience brought an idea to me about burning incense. The collective beauty of the Ginkgo leaves was a magnificent spectacle and I soon began incorporating burning incense with my work.”

“The ceremony of burning papers with incense and soldering iron is a profound part of performance to my art. I carry out this ceremony with patience just like burning incense in ceremonial rituals for purification. In my works I use fire in a technical method by using hot burning incense and a soldering iron to burn permeated screens of Hanji, a Korean traditional paper. I try to show profiles of the modern time of 'cosmopolitanism,' where multi-cultures coexist beyond the collision of eastern and western cultures, in a method of practicing ideology of transmigration of souls in Buddhism. Through a technical image in the ideology of transmigration of souls of all things with life in ashes after their deaths, I produce new images through the repeated burning of Korean traditional papers, one by one."