LEE EUNSAE: COLD RUB

Uranium glass objects are often misrepresented as unsafe for use due to low-level radioactive properties and are thus primarily treated as props or collectible antiquities. Intrigued by this inaccessibility and the allure of the material, Lee painted indirectly from a variety of secondhand sources, including stock images from the Internet and her own photos of the objects. Noting the discrepancies in dimension, color, light, and time across these photographs, Lee collapses the variables onto the canvas and blurs the subjective realities. Through these multiple transpositions, the distance between the viewer and object increases and the original image is lost. What remains, Lee suggests, is the desire to touch.

Elsewhere on the canvases, apparitions of digital screens float freely, disembodied from their embedded placements in social media apps and retail websites. Call-to-action phrases such as “Buy It Now” or “Only 1 Available” suggest an urgency, despite the ambiguity of the product for sale. These symbols of online engagement represent an anxiety rooted in material lust; no matter how hard we swipe, smear, or rub at the surface, we cannot reach through the screen—or a canvas—toward the object itself.

In these new paintings, Lee expresses a failure in meeting the tangible and the real, leaving only traces of frustration and desire as we gaze at images that please and delight, but nevertheless elude us.