Soyoung Lee: Through Reflection

Franklin Parrasch Gallery is pleased to present Through Reflection, an exhibition of new paintings by Soyoung Lee (b. 1973, Seoul, South Korea). Soyoung Lee’s work centers on self-portraiture shaped through reflection and distortion. Drawing from mirrored surfaces including water, windows, computer screens, and mobile phones, Lee incorporates her own image as central subject, rendering fleeting, abstracted and refracted likenesses on canvas that become a means of examining perception, memory, and the shifting boundaries between the self and the artificial world. “When I reflect on myself, I reminisce on the interplay between the natural and man-made as an eternal fingerprint upon existence,” Lee explains. Lee’s paintings evoke the rhythmic patterns of ocean waves -- the push and pull of the tides -- and the sensory qualities of lived experience as she captures vibrating and echoing sound through repeated brush strokes and a deliberate, cadenced layering of her surfaces. Her compositions oscillate between clarity and dissolution where the figure emerges and recedes within stratified fields of color and light. “I find different versions of myself in alternate realities, creating an eternal loop of self-discovery and expression.” Soyoung Lee received her B.F.A. in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1996. She lives and works in Irvine, California.