about - John Seung-Hwan Lee

bio

약력

Living my own art and making art out of my life

I was born in the US in 1987 shortly before my parents moved back to South Korea. I left South Korea when I was 15 and lived in New York prior to moving to Berlin in 2018.

New York was a world of opposites. I was going to grad school at Parsons The New School for Design and was at the same time engaged in the hip hop dance community. Occupy Wall Street in 2011 had charged me politically. Later I joined an activist hip hop crew called The Bronx Boys. All the while trying to elevate street dance to a form of high culture, I kept interest in approaches to use of language, to making art, and to question identities. My graduation left me with more questions than answers, and I came to learn that this never-ending quest is what drives my life and my practice.

After graduation, I listened to podcasts varying from art, literature, politics, history to philosophy, many in Korean. I had little contact with the Korean community in the US and was going through a conflict of inner identity. Reflecting on my historical circumstances, I became interested in North Korea’s unresolved history.

My sense of being foreign to New York’s tumultuous culture grew stronger. Berlin seemed like an artist-friendly city with a history that is deeply affected by the Cold War, similar to Korea. In 2018, I moved to Berlin where I attended seminars and reading groups on topics from North and South Korean relations to revolutionary theories. I was actively engaged in Korean activist communities, but eventually found that philosophy served me the best in fulfilling active and constructive exchange. Alongside, I came to more firmly believe that aesthetics and poetics can exert innate politics.

Organizing a philosophy reading group has become an integral part of my practice. Not only does it illuminate aesthetics, language, politics and history, but it is also a space of possibility for a community. This relation around the written words and readers informs my artistic vision to ground my own migratory experiences.

artist statement

작가 성명서

The dynamic and poetic interplay between body and language is fundamental to my exploration of the evolutionary relationship between dance, drawing and writing rooted in sensory engagement with the world.

I have been shaped by significant relocations from South Korea to the US and from NYC to Berlin. These experiences, along with the linguistic confluence of East and West and my extensive dance training in breaking, inform my performance drawings. Part of my visual expression enlivens asemic writing, where the boundary between writing and drawing is blurred, with a corporeal dimension. By utilizing footwork – involving floor-based moves on the hands and feet – I create abstract figurative images and scripts that are gestural, visual, and textual.

I work across mediums ranging from tactile materials, such as charcoal, wax, ink and ballpoint pen on paper or canvas to video production. Accompanying writings range from conceptual elaborations to poetry. My videos can be documentary or artworks in themselves.

My emphasis on foot and floor stands for liberation through mobility as well as stability through foothold. Influenced by historical materialism, existentialism, and phenomenology, I focus on the material state of my works and contextualize my drawings. My affinity for books informs my choice of paper as a ground for grainy and gritty textures.