Back in Korea, David Choong Lee had an idealized view of the United
States.
He thought America was an idyllic place, with “no crime, no drugs,
no poverty, no homelessness, no unhappiness,” says Brooke Grucella, who
brought a Lee installation to the UA’s Joseph Gross Gallery. “But in
San Francisco, these notions were obliterated.”
Lee arrived in the Bay Area in 1993 to study art, and he learned, to
his shock, that urban America had streets full of drifters and lost
souls. Men lived in cardboard boxes; artists painted their way through
concrete tunnels; and hip-hoppers danced between skyscrapers. He picked
up his art degree, as planned, at the Academy of Art University, but he
stayed on, and the underbelly of the city became his subject.
Sunshine on Cast Shadow, Lee’s 300-piece installation at
Joseph Gross, is an homage to street people and the cities they
inhabit. The gigantic 3-D collage—half-painting, half-sculpture,
it’s an inventive architectural work—takes up five of the six
walls in the big space.
Lee paints on salvaged wooden cigar boxes, crates and pallets, and
he has arranged four years’ worth of the box paintings into a
continuous cityscape, their rectangles mimicking the skyline. And he
has organized the painted boxes by color as well, to suggest a day in
the life. The pale yellows and pinks of dawn in the early sections, on
the first wall, give way to the bright greens and oranges of midday on
wall two, and then to the blues of twilight and the velvety blacks of
midnight on the final walls. Nature in Lee’s dense city is reduced to
light and color.
The boxes are all different sizes and depths, so Lee’s surface is
pleasingly uneven, as lively as an inner-city streetscape, as
syncopated as a song. Some jut out into the gallery; some are almost
flat; some serve as shelves for tiny paintings; others are wooden
canvases for large-scale compositions.
Lee paints in oils, acrylics and house paint, varying between
high-gloss and matte surfaces, and he veers crazily back and forth
between realism and abstraction. Portraits, mostly of young black men,
are rendered almost photographically in a traditional style, with the
distinctive faces of real individuals peering curiously out at the
viewer. But these carefully worked figures are embedded in a city
that’s all abstracted patterns, skittering geometries of circles and
triangles and dots in odd secondary colors—olive, purple, lime. A
skyscraper might be conveyed by a series of pink triangles, or by an
orderly series of orange circles on gray. They’re part-optical
illusion, part-animé, part-graffiti.
One typical small painting (they don’t have individual names) is a
rearview of a young man walking along, listening to music through
earphones. The moving figure is deftly drawn—his head is tilted
as he listens, and his feet are meticulously rendered to convey his
gait. Yet this fellow is moving through a fantasy space: a stylized
spiraling cloud above, a meandering white path below, a splatter of
blue dots ahead, and thick “fingers” of yellow paint stretched across
the body. Sometimes these fantasy cityscapes take over entirely, and
Lee paints a composition without people, using screen and pattern.
Another painting, about 4 feet by 4 feet, is a full-scale
composition conjuring the chaos of the city. The background is a
cacophony of traffic signals and signs. A vehicle is bearing down, and
a parking citation floats where you might expect the sky to be. On
either side, the skyscrapers in their delicate Easter-egg colors
squeeze in. Floating circles within circles are everywhere: green
inside pink; pink inside beige. There’s a man in the middle of all
this, a black guy in horned-rim glasses, and he holds his hands to his
ears and screams, his open mouth a reminder of Munch’s classic
depiction of anguish.
Sometimes, Lee’s art-school art sneaks into all this feverish
creativity. He now teaches at the Art Academy—it’s no surprise to
learn from Grucella that figure-drawing is one of his
specialties—and here and there is a beautifully rendered figure
painting of an art-school nude, or a studio painting of a man in a
chair. A suburban scene of a white man, flanked by green trees and
looking up at an expansive blue sky, makes a surprise appearance. A
nice charcoal drawing of five hands, lightly painted, turns up in the
evening section.
The evening paintings are neon and sinful, with strippers dancing in
the light, and hookers lurking in the shadows. Dots and diamonds and
letters and numbers ricochet across the wood. In the wee hours, this
Fun City turns grim. A threatening man loiters on a dark street. Stuck
outside, the homeless men huddle in hoods and scarves, bracing against
the weather. They’re cold, tired, alone.
One druggie gazes confusedly out at the painter, his eyes watery and
vacant. One young guy yawns mightily, but he has no bed where he can
rest his weary bones; all he has is the shiny black sky above him, and
the gold-diamond skyscraper on his right.
Lee is compassionate toward these outcasts, but he can also see the
joy of the young and the free on the streets. Once in a while, his
shiny city is joyful. In some of the daytime paintings, happy guys zip
along on skateboards, careening through a giant green spiral, zooming
up walls. Or they dance on the pavement, turning their bodies upside
down, their legs jitterbugging in the air. Or they jump among the
towers, flying through the sky.
They defy gravity—and their poverty—to leap tall
buildings in a single bound. That sky and those skyscrapers belong to
the young men of the streets. They don’t own a thing, but the city is
theirs.
This article appears in Jul 23-29, 2009.