For over two decades, Mi Kyung Lee´s unmistakable trademark was black-and-white oil paintings reminiscent of Far Eastern ink paintings, and they remain an integral part of her oeuvre to this day. With elegant flair, she conjures meditative landscapes onto the canvas, always balancing the balance between the random flow of color and the mastery of the brush. The horizontal remains the defining element: interpreted as a low-lying horizon, as the blurring boundary between two ambiguous pictorial layers, or as a light phenomenon in the distance.
But just as in Paris 150 years ago, landscape-oriented Impressionist painting was replaced by the Pointillism of the Neo-Impressionists, Mi Kyung Lee also moves from traditional landscape painting to color-dominated abstraction. The only difference is that her dots appear enormously magnified, like the halftone dots of modern offset printing. The colors are not reduced to four primary colors, but rather a subtle interplay. The artist calls her works “Clouds,” thus revealing her true inspiration: the fine water droplets in a cloud, in which the light refracts in a variety of ways and reflects the surroundings, microscopically magnified. The combination with cushion-like backgrounds, as in Gotthard Graubner’s work, makes Mi Kyung’s paintings even more cloud-like, creating a polyphonic, expansive color music.
Both of the artist’s styles share a profound inner calm, in which everything is held in a kind of suspended state. The artist has been and continues to be presented in numerous exhibitions in Germany, South Korea, and internationally.
Berlin-based painter Mi Kyung Lee is a German artist with Korean roots. After studying at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, she came to Germany in 1990 to study at the Düsseldorf and Münster Art Academies (until 2000), where she graduated as a master student of Prof. Udo Scheel and Prof. Ulrich Erben.
