Lee Wan
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Latest Exhibition

Venice Biennale Korean Pavilion 30th Anniversary Exhibition 'Every Island is a Mountain'
Random Access Memory Chapter 2. ‘Heir’


Artworks
Made in
Proper Time
For a Better Tomorrow
Mr. K and the collection of Korean history
Treasure
A diligent attitude towards a meaningless thing
Us and them
Does anyone have more butter?
The possibility of impossible things
If given a chance, I do refuse it
The force majeure entropy of the inherent towards the absolute standard
How to become us
Forlorn standard
I will become a flower and be with you in the next life
Life is widely spreading blood-red ripples
Kiss lonely goodbye
A forbidden land
DEI GRATIA
Riding art

Generated landscape

Generated landscape, 2023, Korean traditional paper, Korean traditional ink-stick, processing program coding, 800×500 cm


Generated landscape features a Korean traditional landscape painting image, created using the ‘Processing’ image generation program, on a massive 8-meter piece of hanji. Lee Wan collaborated with An Chi-yong and Han Sang-muk to produce traditional ‘Songyeon’ meok, giving life to the painting titled Dots transmitted analog. The entire learning process of hanji, meok, and bow crafting techniques is filmed and presented as a documentary film.

Lee Wan meticulously explores the conceptual structure of his work and dives deep into the artistic process to create remarkable pieces .
Do you see the landscape painting drawn on the huge Korean paper up there? Is the paper really huge? Compared to its special size, the landscape painting does not look very special. I’d like to talk about what kind of secret is hidden in that seemingly unspecial landscape painting.

Traditionally, a landscape painting is a painting of a landscape that the artist saw with his own eyes. Since mountains are the essence of beings that are visible in front of our eyes, the mountains depicted in landscape paintings are conceptually identified with mountains. However, artist Lee Wan transferred the mountain created through program coding to a huge piece of Korean paper using traditional ink techniques.

Artist Lee Wan wrote a generator program code that creates a landscape painting image with a colleague. Each mouse click in the program creates a completely new arithmetic infinitely.

The original image of the gigantic landscape painting is one of those infinitely created images. It looks like the image you see now.

Artist Lee Wan says that the essence of everything we encounter in the future will be code and programming languages. And it reminds us that all the things that humans have created around us are actually converted into familiar shapes, but the essence is different from what we see. Just like cold concrete is hidden behind beautiful wallpaper.

The code for landscape painting is as shown in the following image. Those numerous symbols and formulas are the essence of landscape painting. Computers understand this. Just a list and order of code. It only distinguishes the control value of the LED that lights up the monitor pixel. Any image that stimulates human desire is just a difference in code arrangement, and there is no hierarchy of meaning and value. It also feels like a state of mind like a Buddha who has reached nirvana in Buddhism. It is a realm of fantasy only for humans where instincts as animals are operating. Jealousy, love, hate, happiness.

Oh, come to think of it, this landscape painting is a mountain that is a mountain, but it can be said that it is a landscape painting that depicts a mountain that is not a mountain.