美籍韩裔艺术家Mike Lee的个展“鱼缸”将于2024年1月26日在四方当代美术馆位于上海联华公寓的铜仁路空间开幕。在延续过往数字风格的同时，Mike Lee在其2023年的新作中将碎片化的构图与无尽变化的灰度相结合，重拾情感流动与记忆片段中的人性化经验。

Korean-American artist Mike Lee’s solo exhibition Fishbowl will open on January 26, 2024 in Sifang Art Museum’s Tongren Road Space, inside the historic Avenue Apartments in Shanghai. While persisting with his digital style, Mike Lee integrates fragmentary compositions with ever-changing greyscale in his new works created in 2023, retrieving humanized experiences found in emotional fluxes and episodic memories.

Mike Lee 1983年生于美国加州的一个移民家庭，他的作品关注美国第二代移民的身份认同与生存境遇，并将高度个人化的经历转化为普世的内在情感体验。黑白灰的极简用色、Photoshop与AI制图的电子感，画家的手感和丰沛的情绪仿若图层一样叠加：Mike Lee的绘画如同科技时代人类生存境况的隐喻——在无限的平滑与精确中，留存“人”的痕迹。

Mike Lee was born in 1983 to an immigrant family in California. His oeuvre centers on the identity and survival issues surrounding second-generation American immigrants, transforming highly personal experiences into universally resonant inner emotions. Amidst the minimalist tones of black, white, and grey, and the digitality of Photoshop and AI-generated images, the tactile sense of the artist’s hand and emotional affluence build up like image layers. Lee’s painting serves as a metaphor for the human condition in the era of technology—exploring how to preserve traces of “human” in a vast landscape of smoothness and precision.

在四方当代美术馆上海铜仁路空间中，Mike Lee作品中的精致元素与粗砺的空间形成鲜明对比。“我用尽全力打磨自己的作品，让它们看起来尽可能完美、洁净，但其实我们都在做自己内部的工作，我们尝试改变，我们一直在建设我们的心灵。这个‘诚实’的、不完美的非白盒子空间，就像我们所有人。”

The refined elements in Mike Lee’s work form a stark contrast with the coarse appearance of Tongren Road Space in Shanghai. “I do everything I can to make my work as perfect and clean as possible,” says the artist, “but in the end we’re all work in progress inside.” He continues: “We’re constantly trying to change it and it’s always under construction. So I thought it was a very honest interior. You know, not just interior in the space but also in all of us too.”

在这个“诚实”的空间中，Mike Lee用融合了数字风格和画家之手的作品，穿透虚幻和真实的边界。正如卡夫卡所说：“我们清醒地穿过梦境，我们自己只不过是过去岁月的一个幽灵。”

In this “honest” space, Mike Lee’s works, integrating digital style with the painter’s touch, seem to traverse the boundaries between the fictional and the real. To quote Kafka: “Walking awake through a dream, we are merely specters of a bygone era.”

本次展览将持续至2024年2月29日。

The exhibition is on view through February 29, 2024.

** 关于艺术家 **

About Artist

Mike Lee

Mike Lee，1983年生于美国加利福尼亚州普拉森，2006年毕业于加利福尼亚州洛杉矶奥蒂斯艺术与设计学院，目前生活、工作在纽约布鲁克林。他曾于美国纽约的Half Gallery、ATM Gallery，日本东京的Amala Gallery等举办个展；并参加了洛杉矶日裔美国人博物馆、夏威夷檀香山艺术博物馆、洛杉矶文森特·普莱斯艺术博物馆等机构的群展。

Mike Lee的画作充满图形元素，突出其个人叙事。艺术家捕捉与人类内在情感相联的瞬间与情境。其作品中独特的灰度与断裂错位形式的结合使用，使他能专注于怀旧与纯真，反映我们的记忆相对于现在不断变化的运作方式。受作为美国第二代移民的成长经历的影响，Mike Lee的近作进一步结合语境探索自我身份。在此过程中，他的作品作为一种视觉语言，诉诸于亲密关系的概念。

Mike Lee (b. 1983, Placentia, CA) currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA after receiving his BFA in 2006 from Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA, USA. The artist’s work has been exhibited in galleries across New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo, including solo exhibitions at Half Gallery and ATM Gallery in New York, Amala Gallery in Tokyo, Japan, and many more. He also participated in group exhibitions at Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, California, the Honolulu Museum of Art in Honolulu, Hawaii, and the Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles, California, and many more.

Mike Lee’s paintings are filled with graphic elements, highlighting his personal narrative. Lee captures a moment or situation that is linked to intrinsic human emotions. The exclusive use of grayscale combined with fractured forms in Lee’s works allows him to focus on the nostalgic quality and innocence, reflecting the way our memory works that is in constant flux in relative to the present. More recent works by the artist have been further contextualized to explore his own identity as a self, influenced by his upbringing as a second-generation immigrant in the United States. In the process, his works serve as a visual language that appeals to the concept of intimacy.