Joo Lee Kang

Joo Lee Kang's delicately rendered drawings, done with a ballpoint pen, depict still-lifes teeming with flora and grotesque and mutated fauna. Presented in an ornamental manner of swags, wreaths, and bouquets, they appear as innocent, decorative drawings. Closer inspection reveals a lamb with five legs, conjoined lizards, a two-headed pig, and a winged cat. Her paper-sculpture work uses the same vocabulary of images, but they are presented three-dimensionally, growing out of the wall or floor.

Cate McQuaid of The Boston Globe described in her 2012 article titled "Surprises in Common," "Look closely, and you'll see the critters are horribly deformed. Six-legged pigs, two-headed turtles. She has printed up a creep-tastic wallpaper over which these animals romp in a grid pattern. Then there's "Chaos #7," a paper sculpture covered with the winsome, monstrous beasts in two cyclonic forms that devilishly twist off the wall."

By drawing mutated animals and plants, Joo Lee Kang questions nature’s place in the modern context. What is nature? What is natural? The subjects that she portrays in her drawings reflect the ambiguity of such definitions. They show how she feel at loss to describe what is natural in our present day. Cross-breeding, genetic engineering, and so on; the ways in which humans can control and reconfigure the natural process become more abundant as technology advances. Should the results of such human-developed processes be construed as a part of nature, or should nature exist independently of human progress.

Take for example a tree or a forest specimen replaced in a city setting. Simply because we are able to nourish and grow a tree on top of a building, it doesn't mean that we can neglect the effects of doing so. Couldn't it be that we are moving the tree with enough tact and speed to keep our minds from realizing anything is different, while on a more fundamental level, even our most basic faculty of perception is becoming unavailable to us? A loose verbal rendition of the question I try to ask in my works is, "If a tree is removed from its natural habitat, even though the basic qualities of it stay intact, is it still the same tree, or better yet, is it even a tree at all?