Lee Jinju Act 4, 2024

Act 4 is a powdered pigment, animal skin glue and water painting on unbleached cotton canvas.

The composition on the shaped canvas creates a trompe-l’oeil effect whereby the work appears to be composed of two overlapping canvases. In the foreground of the composition, one sees a woman writing as she is pressed down into a rock by a fig tree in a ceramic pot. Another woman looks on, with a white sheet draped over her head and part of the fig tree. Throughout the painting, runs a delicate red thread, which at one point wraps around the finger of the upper woman tying her to the fig tree and at another point seems almost to run through the lower woman pulling her towards the right-hand screen. At the end of the thread hangs a needle, giving the impression that the two women are sewn together.

Act 4 contains many motifs central to Lee’s practice. The most striking one is her staging of her paintings as cascading screens. In Korean, the term for screen has multiple meanings such as a stage curtain or membrane. The artist enjoys playing with these gaps of meanings in her work and sees the shaped canvases as additionally having an architectural presence that she imagines extending into the gallery space so that its walls become the margins of the works. Another recurring motif in Lee’s paintings is to depict women who are confined or pressed down by either the screens themselves or elements that relate symbolically to societal pressures. The text that woman on the rock is writing is partially obscured, but the characters suggest a message along the lines of “I couldn’t.” In this case, one could understand the fig tree to be symbolic of fertility and the social pressure on women to bear children.