Lee Seung Chul

"Coq-imperial (Rooster & Blue Bottle)" Contemporary Mixed Media Painting on Wood

2019

Lee Seung Chul was born in 1962 Seoul, South Korea. In 1985 he joined the Art team at munhwa Broadcasting Corpration, and in 1997 he was part of the Computer Graphic Designer at Seoul Broadcasting System. In 2004 he became the Art General Manager at Inchon Television Limited. Rooted in the tradition of improvisation and abstraction, Lee Seung Chul’s paintings serve as windows into the labyrinthine depths of human emotion and external form. Each canvas becomes a stage for a dance of brushstrokes—a symphony of harmonies, undulations, and discordant cadences that mirror the complexities of the human condition. For two years before 2017, he decided to paint roosters, nothing but roosters, only roosters. His choice was made because of the year of the Coq (Rooster) in Chinese astrology, which is a practical and philosophical way of approaching mental and emotional truths through allegorical and symbolic means. By painting roosters, Lee Seung Chul has chosen to dive into the mysteries of this animal with an acute awareness of the painter's work. A painter is an essential actor in the field of culture and therefore he is the equivalent of a magician or a shaman of today, that is, an active clairvoyant of expectations of explanations about the future; to offer such an opening of spirit, he must manage to operate in his art this magic transformation of a figurative element in symbol. By discovering Lee Seung Chul's roosters, we understand both what the painter's work is and what is the transmutation of a figure, in this case, that of the animal rooster into a rooster symbol. And it can't be done all at once. It is necessary, indeed, to plunge into the plastic richness that the animal offers, but also into the numerous meanings which it carries. The symbol is what allows the deepening of the sensitive consciousness. Lee Seung Chul by painting a large number of roosters has perfectly understood that it was like a kind of method to stimulate our emotions, to awaken our sensations, to make our eyes sing, and that the pictorial intensity could be attained by the accumulation and the variation. In front of his paintings, we stand at the threshold of a sensation, at the moment when a new state of consciousness is awakened in us. For him to transmit a part of his power to us, the painter had to open up to a great deal of freedom in his gestures as well as in the use of color. Thanks to his talent as a painter, each rooster is a radiant source of light and color, emotion and movement. In the Chinese zodiac, the rooster is excessive in everything. It has tremendous qualities but also enormous flaws. He is loyal, outgoing, optimistic, and jovial, but also tiring, stubborn, and proud. Roosters like to show themselves spectacle because they consider themselves better than they really are. They have great ideas, huge hearts, and desires to be the hero of their life.