Portal of Mystery: 이호억
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Portal of Mystery 22.11.3 - 12.23
이호억 -
Press Release Text
Author: Paik Philgyun
Title: White Garden and Black Boat – A Letter to Lee Houk in 2023
Following Samjeon 1-ri, Samjeon 1-ri; following Samjeon 2-ri, Samjeon 2-ri. In Nonsan, Chungnam, the city bus announcements called out different villages using the same names. Riding along the straight road, the end of January was like a deep winter afternoon, a long exhale of the cold season. As the bus discharged its last passenger and prepared to return, someone dashed after it, urgently chasing the departing bus. Did the bus fail to see him? It moved away without hesitation. Someone else stood still. While watching the two backs, a stone appeared from nowhere and fell into an inner layer of the body’s surface. Since one bus passed through the village once a day and the other only five times a day, some had to repeat the waiting of the past once more.
The sensation of being alone on the road was familiar to me, yet that day felt distinctly different. I was the last passenger on the bus, waiting for the next bus along with someone else from the village. A local resident told me that his place was near the border between Chungcheong and Jeolla, between one province and another. They said that along the road, the land splits and names change.
I turned my back on the road and walked toward the narrow path; a path too tight for cars, an uphill trail leading to the mountain. I passed traces where human paths intersected with those of wild animals and reached the mid-slope of the mountain. Turning back, I saw the midday sunlight pooling in the valley.
Along the roadside, I saw an empty fence. Lee Houk had once told me that several deer had lived inside it. Long-necked, clear-eyed creatures must have endured the winds blowing from the ridges into the valley day and night. Where has the deer gone now? In front of the fence, two dogs appeared instead, locking eyes with me. They sensed the faint, urban stench emanating from my body and stayed wary. Apologetically, I had no way to erase that smell. Their loud barking continued until the scent vanished from their noses.
Under the high ceiling, the space looked like a training room for an athlete, with a few pieces of exercise equipment. Against one wall leaned a framed drawing of a judo uniform painted in ink, and not far from it a tent had been set up. A pile of paper on the floor showed traces of Lee Houk’s recent work there¹.
In 2022, Lee Houk moved the White Garden and Black Boat between Nonsan and Seoul. Heavy rain fell into an artificial pond, and the bank collapsed under some unknown force. A garden spilled out across the space; dak paper hanging on the wall and unbleached cotton cloth spread across the floor. Stones and water, flowers and grass rolled through the room.
For Lee Houk, who values non-human ecologies, an exhibition is always an extension of his work. Unlike his fieldwork in the wild, the act of exhibiting releases the breath of water and soil into human society. At first, the two may seem opposite, yet the flooding of a boat that once crossed the Geum River into the city follows the world’s nature; a world that has shifted without end since the beginning. In the series he has carried from early on to the present, especially the Bones of the Wind works and one piece subtitled “Some Possibility”, the changing strokes he shapes with ease echo this restless nature of the world.
The black boat pushed into the garden becomes both a campfire in the city and an ark holding its ground against a rising flood. After a long passage, it rests and prepares for another departure. Around the boat, long, twisting muslin bags swell and shrink as air moves through them. Are they knots crumpled deep in the pond, or the trembling pleura of a pulsing sunset²? Ink on the muslin takes the posture of a dragon about to leap into another world. Beneath the hull that once crossed the Geum River, the thick pile of timber and splinters carries the sensation of a forested mountain. The garden and the outer world touch and tangle.
Where, then, does Lee Houk’s self-breathing stride lead? Following the “tree that runs on its own”, the brushstroke racing out of the garden becomes the shadow of an unseen “black deer”³. In his autobiographical narrative, the black deer mediates memories of his clan’s burial forest, the difficulties and pain faced across his life, the truth he searched for beyond them, or perhaps a presence whose nature can never be known. Lee and the black deer are close yet distant. In a story that he once followed a particular cloud and rendered it in drawings, the cloud trades places with the deer. What do the antlers, stretched toward the sky, try to receive? Standing in the white garden, he calls out to the mountains and rivers, demanding an answer from the world. His titles The Red Echo and The Blue Echo hold this waiting. The other who might answer his movement and voice has not yet appeared.
In the white garden, where the time of an echo is endlessly delayed, red dusk seeps in and a blue moon rises. Only at night does he see the small stone that had sunk below that surface. It was the stone that had stirred the still water.
¹ Outside the back door of the studio, a sculpture resembling the head of a stone Buddha looked out over a grove of plum trees. On the lids of the crocks in front of the studio, a geometric gray sculpture sat as if guarding something in the midst of fermenting.
² In this text, noeul (sunset) refers both to the ohur of dusk and to Nolme, the old name of Nonsan meaning “the mountain where the sunset rests”, which points to the place where Lee Houk lives
³ This reference is borrowed from The Black Deer (2017), a novel by the writer Han Kang.
