In contemporary painting, nature has shifted from being an ‘object to be seen’ to an ‘entity to be felt and responded to’, becoming a place that mediates senses, emotions and memories. Paul Cézanne saw nature not simply as something to be depicted, but as the ‘realization of sensation’, and this marks an important turning point that deconstructed the perception of nature as an object of representation. Cézanne deconstructed form and observed nature in the relationship of surface and color. This became the starting point of modern painting that reconstructs and reinterprets nature.
《Promenade》 presents new works by Jeanie Lee, who has explored the harmony of East and West through paintings that mainly depict nature such as flowers, grass, sky and clouds, traversing the realms of figuration and abstraction.
Lee does not view nature as a simple object of representation. For her, nature is a medium where angles, emotions, and the stream of memories intersect, which is then unfolded on the canvas through the sense of touch and spontaneity of the fingertips. The approach that prioritizes the flow of sensation and the momentary nature of relationships over the fixation of form aligns with the post-Cézanne trend of the ‘realization of sensation’. She delicately captures the communion between personal sensation and nature on canvas, following the trajectory of painting history that has moved from ‘form to sensation’ and from ‘the external to the internal.’
In this exhibition, Lee presents a series of works reminiscent of trees, titled <Promenade>, that go beyond simple depiction of nature, but expresses the surroundings the artist encountered while taking a walk as objects of inner wonder and communion in a soft, warm, and sometimes tense manner. The viewers will be able to experience her painting technique that uses her fingers and palms, along with cloth and sponge to create a more delicate touch and a variety of greens, expressing the green of a summer day in her own visual language.
