The Studio of the sculptor Lee Yeoungsup is located a little higher than the empty site where the ancient Godal Temple once stood. Everywhere man lives is probably similar, yet in the artist’s studio you can feel even more time where life now and life in the past trade places. This is a place where time past and time present flow in one current of air, where places in the past and places in the present touch each other and become one texture, where the artist uncovers time, layer by layer.

Lee has lived for years near the site where the ancient Godal Temple once Stood. The rarefied air of this place, where time past seems to flow and cut through time present, must have touched the nature of the artist.

The response that the artist has found here cannot be seen as something that ignores the demands of contemporary sculpture, even though the response belongs to the past. On the other hands, the response is close to an essential aesthetic consciousness that still inspires an emotion after having survived the violence of time that targets at each moment the disappearance of existence and crosses the earth since the beginning of time. This means that the response is also near to the original form that comes from existence, like a fountain from which time flows. In this context, the work of the artist is to restitute and return the original and essential form, which, more than all else, is Korean.

Art Critic _ Goh, Chunghwa