LANDSLIDE

GORDON CHEUNG / MASAKATSU KONDO / SEA HYUN LEE

19 Nov– 20 Dec 2008
Opening Reception: Wed 19 Nov 6-9pm

I-MYU PROJECTS is pleased to present LANDSLIDE a group show that brings together the work of
artists, Gordon Cheung, Masakatsu Kondo and Sea Hyun Lee, who working internationally each have
strong links to Eastern Asia, to China, Japan and South Korea respectively. Their work individually and
collectively informs a site of landscape that draws on historical representations of landscape from the
East and West as well as current social and political interchanges between its cultures and economies.

Gordon Cheung’s paintings create spaces of fictive encounter that draw on the lucid nostalgia of
multiple layers of cultural motifs that include comic books, cinema and computer gaming. The pictorial
elements of the work are underpinned by collaged elements, vertically aligned financial numbers from
the stock market pages of the Financial Times. Structurally supporting the printed and painted overlay
of urban reaches and tower blocks these newspaper elements hint as much to a fragility and disjunction
underlying the paradigms of a global economy as they do to the power of construction. The works
reveal points of Chinese cultural heritage, motifs from political posters intercut with contemporary
motifs of sprayed graffiti. The capitalist money markets exist in a real sense in these landscapes, and the
works draw on the fluctuation of both utopian and dystopian fields of encounter, describing an
uncertain terrain between real and unreal spaces, and between economies of cultural exchange in a
world underpinned by numbers and a global network of virtual reality.

In conjunction with Cheung’s work the paintings of Masakatsu Kondo further draw on a cross-cultural
currency of visual language concurrent to traditions of landscape painting from both Eastern Asia and
Europe. The works construct intricate points of tension between elements of heightened nostalgia.
Receding and washed-out landmasses of fallen or broken trees are punctuated with the intensity of an
occasional mark and painterly slippage that brings the work uncompromisingly to a contemporary
sphere. Devoid of human presence the works jar against the site of dreamscape to which they elude,
butterflies become harbingers of an unspoken but darker social tension that resonates through the work.

Sea Hyun Lee’s paintings are constructed from pictorial fragments of mountainous landscape drawn
from both North and South Korea, each element contained and isolated as a singular structural
landmass within a large missive void. Consistent in their tonal rendering these multiple pockets of
mountainous landmass sidestep social and political division, constructing formal articulations of
traditional Korean landscape painting through the conjunction of contemporary sites of landscape and
fictive representations drawn from historical sources, from books, engravings and photographs.
Vertically layered the works adhere to pictorial conventions of receding perspective and retain a linear
flatness akin to that of a printed text, the individual blocks of landmass becoming equivalents to
calligraphic marks. Sea Hyun Lee consistently uses a monochromatic of red across his work, allowing the
work to simultaneously draw on multiple points of social and political evocation whilst offering a
singularity of reading across the real and unreal spaces that are juxtaposed as convergent fragments.

I-MYU Projects
1st fl. 23 Charlotte Road
London EC2A 3PB
UK

Phone : +442070334480
Fax : +442080825876
Email : imyuprojects@gmail.com
Eunbok Yu(Eunice Yu) / Jeongae Im

OPENING TIMES
Tuseday - Saturday: 10:00am-6:00pm.
Closed
Sunday-Monday