MIKE LEE
No Man's Land
Artist Reception: October 13th, 6-8 PM
October 13th - November 9th, 2022
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The Italian Futurists concerned themselves with energy transfers and the unease of contemporary living - notions about progress - but they could never have imagined how the LAN gaming boom might intersect with their concepts. Giacomo Balla depicted the speed of light , not what a computer glitch reads out as during a simulated airstrike. It would be a mistake to characterize Mike Lee’s paintings simply as an extrapolation of Left 4 Dead 2. And while his palette remains stark to compare him to Tomoo Gokita or Wilhelm Sasnal is to surrender to a B&W strain of color blindness.
Lee’s focus, instead, is the fallout of conflict and the tug of war between man vs nature. “Gaming culture was a big part of my adolescence and a form of escape,” says the artist. “As a child, the fascination with war was tied to a level of fantasy and excitement, but approaching adulthood I developed a better understanding of the true consequences. The rise of the internet and access to widespread information provided me an insight to the immense catastrophes as well as the discrepancies of the media's encapsulation of reality.”
The title of this exhibition, “No Man’s Land,”’ immediately conjures visions of the DMZ between North Korea and South Korea. Eschewing the obvious, Mike Lee turned to the overlaps of an untouched landscape and the physical devastation caused by battle. Think of how a trench is prepared for soldiers - the vast amounts earth displaced - only to witness this same intervention from above where it appears as a dry riverbed. Think of a leveled city as a kind of scorched forest witnessed from this same vantage point, a bird’s eye view , a critical distance of verticality. He remembered his mother’s garden from his formative years. The bloomed white rose symbolized the beauty and growth that emerges from the chaos of competing fauna. What a fortuitous dovetailing that the white rose is also the flower used to commemorate the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. For whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.