이상원

  Most of Lee Sang Won's works are based on his own photographs taken at the site. There are no special standards for the landscape or characters to choose from, but he uses specific materials such as watercolor, oil paints, acrylic paints, and traditional ink paints in order to depict more familiar and friendly scenes. He started the crowd series by finding and drawing certain social patterns of people in seasonal recreational landscapes. By not showing facial expressions, it became impossible to judge the individual characters and wanted to draw them as someone on a vacation, not a specific person.

  Lee uses photographic media as an artistic tool and does not hesitate to coexist with painting, and further attempts to complement each other with each specificity. In modern society, photography is deeply related to mechanical speed, popularity, consumption, and daily life. Thus, Lee uses photography to easily bring popular entertainment, tourism, social or political events away from art into the artistic realm, while overlapping with paintings the constancy, tenderness, abstraction, and artificial effects that were accused of lacking photographic imagery.