Opening reception June 3, 16 – 18. Welcome!

seoI give form to my imagination and a myriad of everyday visual images that confront or have nothing to do with one another but become one for a moment. The Monster Project is a work to stimulate the viewer’s quote imagination by combining images that others have and my own images through magical functions and actions. I have focused on monsters as I consider both works of art and monsters as products of our imagination.

As a preliminary work of the project, I informed children under age of six of the existence of monsters through the web site (http://beaugly.com) and performances. I have also published monster collections to American and British kids on the internet. The Monster Project, based on a scenario that a monster research fellow collects monsters using high-tech equipments, began by making children to imagine monster images and depict them.

I interpret and recompose gathered monster images with my imagination, and then confine them to the monster traps I conceived. I show them again to the children. When viewing those monsters on display, children who used to fear monsters get convinced that they no longer exist in this world and their surroundings. The exhibition visitors testify to the invisibility of the monsters by standing at the site where images in the artist’s heart are blended with children’s images. Those images create another cycle of images.”

Seo Joon Lee

Seo Joon Lee (born 1972 in Suwon, Korea) is artist-in-residence at HIAP during May-July 2008. While in residency he did a performance at a kindergarten in Helsinki and at a Finnish home, to get images of a monster under the bed. You can participate in completing the Finland monster project by contacting Beaugly laboratory on internet at http://www.beaugly.com.

After studying sculpture at Seoul National University (B.F.A/M.F.A), Seo Joon Lee had his first solo exhibition at Dukwon gallery at Seoul in 2006. Recently he was chosen for the exhibition “SeMA 2008 selected eMerging artists” in Seoul Museum of Art (March-June 2008).