Jongkie Lee, whose retrospective exhibition Enchanted Planet takes place this year, is a mid-career artist who has firmly established his place—having participated in 35 invitational exhibitions and over 70 art fairs (including the 2014 Seoul Art Show) since his first solo show in 2009. Since the beginning, Lee tinkered with roots of his indigenous culture rather reach toward distant, transcendent ideals. His works, materials, and demonstrative performances actualizes an “enchanted planet.” This fantastical atmosphere is not unrelated to the music and cartoons, old objects and townscapes that feature in his works. There permeates a sense of fun and idealism that contrasts with the mundane and banal, acting as a buffer between the imaginative self and a sober reality. The works that seem too young for a retrospective take attains retrospective status through their evocative nature. They are all Lee’s favorite items, but there is no denying that they are of “kidult” taste. However, the time has come when such tastes are no longer in the minority, and his work must have been in the spotlight. Lee utilizes elements of “high art” through his use of white porcelain or Whanki Kim’s works but desires to playfully engage beyond their associated lofty ideals. The artist endeavors to hark back to sentiments of an art world pre-valuation and codification. The feelings that Kim had when he stamped the blue dots, and the feelings that potters had when they made simple jars to use as everyday containers, have since become material symbols in academic and institutional systematization.

Kim was a lover of moon jars and collected many of them—often featuring them in his works. A friend of Soonwoo Choi, the first director of the National Museum of Korea, Kim recognized the value of moon jars as early as the 1950s. The imagination of the universe as contained in such ceramics were perhaps attempts toward capturing the infinite on screen. Lee's favorite popular culture also expresses this idealism but differs from products originally intended for mass distribution. What's soft becomes hard. Original intention becomes authority. Playfulness becomes norms. Lee breaks these rules. The 40 works of old and new selected for this exhibition raise issues related to “beauty and ugliness, real and fake,” per the artist. His amusement lies in the mixing the categories of his own distinguishment. It's not as arbitrary as some aspects of contemporary art; he doesn't utilize materials unless they're something he's been involved with. He uses his alter ego in The Simpsons or his prized collectibles of Superman to infiltrate the fragile little microcosm of fantasy. Fantasy meets fantasy, and the number of combined fantasies increases with each work. What's required then is transformation. Superman is also a product of transformation: what if we could go beyond the object that we see from a distance, and enter the blue dots of Kim Hwan-ki's paintings that evoke infinity, or play with the imaginary flora and fauna painted on blue-white paper?

- Sunyoung Lee