War, though often unseen, surrounds us at every moment. Battleground invites us to look into the connection between war and present life. This is carried out by harnessing the power of painting, believing in the dynamics of space, allowing beauty to be perceived and apprehending distress.
Draped with visual devices exuding aesthetic rhetoric, Battleground delves into the ominous implications of battlefields. Here, the formal elements indicative of war are absent. Instead, large-scale paintings with blithe curves, rude porcelains and fabric swags are brought together in the exhibition. The images distort, exaggerate and embellish objects with imagination, capturing the atmosphere of military conflicts and abstract concepts of borderlands rather than representing specific battlefields. It is the vision of breathtaking natural landscapes that conveys such atmospheres bearing semblance to those of a buffer zone ― a site established through agreements by warring parties after brutal conflicts. In such areas, neutrality is maintained without an exchange of violence, conflicts are mitigated, safety is guaranteed, artificial structures are often removed, and nature’s own ways flourish. It is a place premised on potential conflicts, with floral blasts, rosy smokes and hilly demilitarization. Conveying beautiful scenery established by nature and simultaneously triggering latent distress in human psychology, a buffer zone signifies its peculiar affectivity.
The story of Haevan Lee is grounded on her personal experiences in a border area. She was brought up near the DMZ (the demilitarized zone), a product of the Korean Armistice Agreement in 1953, and later travelled to witness militarized borders across many countries. Generally, even slight movements are not permitted in these restricted areas if deemed dangerous to either party. Such places reminded her of the barbed wire fences, guard posts and the footprints that stopped just before minefields, and they made her reminisce about the animals and plants inhabiting the area where the traces of human activity had ceased. She saw the devastation of humanity’s livelihood caused by war on live broadcasts, just as she had heard from her relatives whose way of life had changed after a ravage of fire in the border area. All these experiences felt real to her. Even though she hasn’t experienced them herself, the repeated scenarios of conflicts have accumulated in her memory, and they are translated into overlapping images ― some similar, some dissimilar. Her paintings and their exhibition space juxtapose the warmth of mountaintops and undulating waves with the dismal air over explosion sites, evoking thoughts of war’s profound impact on I, us, nature and the border area.
The exhibition Battleground will be held in Amsterdam in September 2024 and Seoul in October 2024. The same works are presented in separate contexts at the interval of a month. The artist’s show is presented in the dome architecture of Bradwolff Projects in Amsterdam and will be arranged across the two-story galleries at the Insa Art Center in Seoul. Located in the northwest of Seoul and the southeast of Amsterdam, respectively, these two far-distant places have a seven-hour time difference. They cannot meet in terms of time and space; they only overlap what is to come and repeat what has passed. In this field, where things moving in different directions converge, we approach beyond the point where peacefulness and confusion compete to emerge.
-Text by Jinju Kim
Haevan Lee (b.1990, South Korea) is a contemporary artist who explores the geopolitical landscape of border and buffer zone across the globe, in the form of a painterly study of such sites. She utilizes landscape painting, storytelling, and historical research to delve into the complexities of border politics and ecology. Through various forms of expression such as painting, installation, and video, she captures the regional context of specific sites. She graduated with a Master in Artistic Research (MA) from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, Netherlands, and she also holds a Bachelor of Oriental Painting in Fine Arts from Sungkyunkwan University, Republic of Korea. Currently, living and working in The Hague, Netherlands, and Seoul, Korea.
