Familiarity is formed through repetition. As we encounter and read things over and over, they gradually become recognisable. At a certain point, we come to believe that we know what something is without needing to look at it closely any longer. Yet this sense of familiarity can also fix us within a particular way of understanding things. We retain only what is necessary to recognise their meaning, while the rest naturally recedes from view. Jinhyung LEE’s paintings invite us to look again at what is lost or excluded in this process—in other words, in the formation of familiarity.
Having developed a practice that obscures the referential function of images, moving beyond the process through which they are read according to their original meanings to reveal the forms and sensations that remain, LEE turns his attention in What Words Leave to the referential function of language. Taking familiar words such as LoVe, LifE and TiME, he extracts and combines only the spaces occupied and left behind by their letters, reconfiguring them into new forms. The strokes of letters and the spaces between them give shape to one another, yet we tend to focus on reading the words, leaving these spaces in the background. LEE isolates these spaces and places them at the centre of the canvas. No longer empty spaces that serve to convey meaning, they emerge as visual subjects in their own right, each with a distinct contour.
The title What Words Leave refers not only to the traces left behind after something has disappeared. It points, rather, to what was there all along but went unnoticed as we attended to something else. Understanding what something means is not necessarily the same as seeing it in its entirety. Through the forms that remain within images and letters, LEE shifts our gaze towards what lies beyond what we believe we already know.
