Confessions 

“Memories of family rituals based on Buddhist beliefs linger strong in my mind since migrating from Korea. Always on New Year Eve we wrote our confessions from the past on papers, which were then folded and burnt. The act of repeating this ritual became cathartic to me and spiritually connected me to my family.”

Psalms

“I am paying homage to two religions in this work which consists of small pieces of Hanji paper, on these I have written all the Psalms from the Bible, parodying the Buddhist paper prayer ritual. This reflects my faith and gratitude with the Catholic religion which has helped me since migrating to Australia whilst paying homage to Buddhism, my guiding light in Korea, my country of birth.”

Compassion

“Compassion deals with the concept and act of compassion and is a complex summation work of many layers – physically, psychologically and spiritually, bringing together influences from my Buddhist upbringing, Korean cultural heritage and life experience. My work is vested in the mediation process and philosophy where a would held from the past, through forgiveness, can be purged and cleansed, leading through compassion to enlightenment.”

Dear My Father

Dear My Father is homage to her father and the scroll form calligraphic Buddhist sayings he would send to her to guide and provide solace for her in times of challenge.

A sense of healing and wanting to put away things from the past characterize HyunHee Lee’s most recent works. The process of her art making is both as performance and a kind of catharsis. Sitting and embroidering she describes as meditative and healing. Stitches close wounds forming silken ‘scars’. Hes is an action, not of forgetting – but recalling; acknowledging; recording and protecting; sometimes wrapping into parcels of time and place, of linking past and present. The artist’s sentiments are personal yet public and shared as singular yet universal emotions.

– written by Barbara Dowse