Seulgi Lee — Damasese — Jousse Entreprise — Art contemporain — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 20 → November 25, 2017

It is now more than three years ago since Seulgi Lee undertook the production of “nubi”, or perhaps we should say “neo-nubi”, so new do they appear. Flamboyant, black on white or multi-coloured (and this sometimes from front to back), these traditional Korean blankets are currently diverted from their original motifs—but without parting with their uses—to become a (pictorial) sequence of transcriptions of proverbs on the limit of figuration. So through the entanglement of lines combined with the reading of the titles, you will perhaps recognize a belief, a protective rite (or not). Nowadays called by a simple letter followed by an adage that has become a poem, first translated and then conveyed by the weave, this new alphabet book elegantly displays “U: Like a ghost who sings by making shrill cries. = An unbelievable event” and “U: Even the straw sandal finds its peer = A sister soul exists for everyone”.

The letter, and thereby the language in its most primitive form, is indeed the leading character in this first solo show at the Jousse Entreprise gallery. Called DAMASESE, it summons (through this invented word) animated signs and their opposites, in particular Ixcatec, a pre-Hispanic tongue (without writing) spoken by fewer than ten people, hailing from a province of Oaxaca, which the artist discovered quite by chance during a recent stay in Mexico, where she had gone for a project involving dialogue between artisanal basketry and oral culture. Intrigued by that immaterial heritage, Seulgi Lee first talked with female basket-makers, and then with the linguist Evangelia Adamou, a specialist in this Oto-Manguean lexicon. Those encounters gave rise to hybrid constellations, vertical and horizontal alike, of tenates (baskets), woven in palm fronds, whose typology seems at times akin to certain exotic flowers.

But what happens when you follow a rabbit under a full moon, and stumble upon an almost dead language?