YOORA LEE : SHADOW ETCHED IN STONE

Yoora Lee is a sentimental romantic cocooned inside a gauzy shell of pop culture, art history, and traditional craft passed down from generation to generation. Shadow Etched in Stone, Lee’s first solo exhibition with Nicodim and her second in Los Angeles, begins with the palette and iconography of Matisse as her building blocks, softens the focus, and constructs amply-lit stages from them. The post-impressionist brushstrokes she uses to construct these sets are the protagonist, highlighting the seasonality, ennui, and distance between the interiors, exteriors, and figures within each composition. Each painting is a dramatic one-act about light, shadow, and absence.

Lee’s reference points are both personal and autobiographical, in that everything within her work originates from something she loves. She grew up on Japanese romance films (which were de-rigeur in South Korea, where Lee was born and raised), floral craft her mother would create at home, and art history books, all of which populate this body of work on level-footing. In Flickering Shadow, a female figure ascends a staircase, her back to the viewer. The composition itself is borrowed directly from the promotional video for the song Chill Kill by K-Pop act Red Velvet, repopulated with imagery from Lee’s own experience: on the figure’s left, shadows resembling the cutouts of Matisse, to her right, three framed paintings, one by Balthus, one by Munch, and finally, a representation of one of her mother’s crafted floral arrangements. 

Windows are ever-present throughout, granting the viewer access to more intimate scenes, though many of the windows have already had great visibility of their own. The layout of Mellow tune is affectionately borrowed from the 2003 Korean film The Classic, but recasts the central figure as the artist herself, gazing longingly at a couple outside. The setting of Lover’s Concerto is borrowed from a scene of a film of the same name, but Lee includes a window sill between her viewers and subjects, adding an enticing layer of separation and voyeurism to the equation. In Shadow Etched in Stone, the yearning is just as cherished as the having.