Kho, Chung-Hwan (Art Critic)

Excerpt from

In the current exhibition, Byungho Lee presents a series of works created under the theme of Shade Tree. Shade Tree, used as the title of the exhibition, contains multiple meanings: it could be a shadow of a tree, a shade by a tree, or a shade tree. However, the theme of this exhibition emphasizes on the notion of shade rather than that of a tree. The whole exhibition venue is devised as a form of a house for this exhibition. This might be to recall an old house, shaded by a big tree, or to recollect the reminiscence, symbolized by a shade of a tree, or the properties of memories itself. In this space, the artist arranges silicon sculptures here and there. Every sculpture in the house shows transitional processes between youth and adulthood, and life and death, questioning whether there has existed an actual period of time, when our hearts beat for the beauty of juvenility and youth. These questions are further amplified by black and white photographs from the artist’s personal memories, added to the sculptures. Meanwhile, a statue framed in a translucent glass case also presents an atmosphere of non-existence and unreality.

Even though the sculptures and photographs have presence and exist in the present reality, they might be an homage to the time that was recalled from the past, which doesn’t even exist or the longing for something from the past that is intense and distant, as much as it is faint and misty. As the artist employed invisible and intangible air to bring audiences in front of representations of death, he might have wanted to evoke the very psychological truth or experience of longing for something shapeless, colorless, soundless onto the surface perception. Above all, the artist might have wanted to make the non-existence (the traces of existence) become the representations of existence. Thus I like the title Shade Tree better than A Shade of a Tree. This way, being more nonexistent and unrealistic, the title draws more attention to the absence of existence.