My most recent art crush: Lee Jae-Hyo

LEE JAE-HYO
(1965, South Korea)

Lee Jae-hyo was born in 1965 in Hapchen, Korea. He graduated from Hong-ik University with a degree in Plastic Art. He assembles natural materials such as wood pieces, branches and leaves, or iron nails, into three-dimensional works which have elegant forms and also convey a strong contemporary mood. He has had many solo exhibitions in Korea, Japan, China, the United Kingdom and the United States. He has won a number of honours, including Grand Prize of Osaka Triennial (1998), Young Artist of the Day presented by the Ministry of Culture of Korea (1998) and Prize of Excellence in the 2008 Olympic Landscape Sculpture Contest. His works are widely appreciated and adored by art collectors in Asia, Europe and America.

I began to fancy myself as a strangeness machine, rather than a poet per se.

Mathias Svalina: Violence is an ever-present human condition that induces change. It's deeply seeded in religious & political mythos; the fear of its revolutionary potential is one of the guiding forces of civilization. Something erupting out of nothing is a kind of primal understanding of violence. The violence of birth, of the skin opening up & revealing all the insides. All that stuff is the material of myth. In the pedagogy of life lessons, no one learns without violence. Yet violence is inherently absurd. The disconnect between all forms of civilizing, ameliorating human socialization & the violence needed to keep them in place is absurd. I'm not choleric by nature, so violence on a personal level fascinates me. If I remember correctly, no one benefits from violence in DM. Violence is part of how people interact & make sense of one another.

Happy as a freshly washed kitten laying in the sun on a pink towel!

This has been a grueling summer. In fact, it can't even be called summer, because it lacked the essentials of summer goodness: increased melanin, naps, marathons of the TV variety, reading, reading, reading, boredom, travel. Instead, this has been the summer of toiling on the anthology and being pasty. But relief is in sight! We'll be in Galle, Sri Lanka from July 23rd to August 6th.

We'll be going here:



And staying here:






And how do I feel about this?




(This photo was taken by a very talented and wonderful VCUQ student.)