Between Red-015AUG01

LEE Seahyun organizes the canvas by juxtaposing the sea viewed from his hometown, Geoje Island, and the DMZ that he saw through night vision goggles during his military service. In his Between Red-015AUG01 (2013), the landscape looks like a utopia but in fact embodies a dystopia, destroyed by men. The piece holds on to the disappearing scenery of Korea and reveals nostalgia for the vanishing past, and arranges elements of the division such as warships, cannonballs, collapsed buildings and barbed-wire fences on the canvass as a metaphor for our painful history and reality. These fragmented landscapes organically harmonize within the overall rhythmic form of the work, and the red colored figures with military implications show how political ideology operates not only in this painting but also in the world beyond.