どこまでもやさしい。

マイケル・リーを知っている人なら、彼がどんなに優しいかは良くわかっている。

結構、あんなに頭いいとイヤなタイプが多いのに、何故そんなに優しいのかいつも丌思議だった。

何故、仕事を辞めてまで絵を描こうと思ったのかも丌思議だった。

でもそんな疑問に、彼の作品は答えてくれる。

彼 から作品を見せられた時に、その構図、ライン、そして色が単純化されているにも関わらず、その奥にあるもの、その色の下に隠されたものを感じてた。ひたす ら、単純化する努力をしているように思えた。 相手に何かを伝えたい時に、入口は簡単そうに見えたほうが入りやすいし、言葉を越えて伝えることは、シンプルにしたほうが伝わるから。

プリミティブで優しい。易しいけれど深い。

すばらしく綺麗な色に包まれた、彼の思いをぜひ見てみてください。

そして作品を通して、マイケル・リーとの会話を楽しんでください。

阪上照明

infinitely approachable

"People who know Michael Lee will agree how approachable he is with others.

I have always been curious as to how he can be so kind and easy to others, when there are so many different types of people he must have had to deal with. It was a further mystery when I learned that he had moved to become an artist departing from corporate life.

However, the answers to those questions can be found in his paintings.

When I saw his paintings, I sensed there were things that lay beneath the simplified forms, lines, and colors. However, I could also sense his careful attempts to make those visions simple and approachable. This may be exemplified by the fact that it is always easier to be simple and approachable when first communicating with others. Regardless of the ultimate truths which underlie his paintings, he facilitates this dialogue via simplified means to enter into a person’s mind. Art that transcend words must be so to be appreciated.

Primitive but elegant. Approachable yet profound.

I hope people will appreciate his visions in the beautifully composed mélange of colors and forms.

Through his works, I hope you will also indulge in the dialogue with Michael Lee."

Teruaki Sakagami
Tokyo, Japan

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"Nowadays, it seems like a prerequisite that a young artist should start out his career with a self-entitled, antagonistic attitude towards his work but neither armed with seasoned and matured experience of life nor, more importantly, awareness of the antecedents, near and far, that carved out reactionary, if not responsive concepts to the generation before, making certain realities in art nearly impossible to exist in a mere vacuum. In yet another prerequisite is the unofficial school of thought that not a great deal of relevant material came out of the past prior to the parody-ridden generation of Warhol, only to know –with a small measure of humility – that nearly half a century before Warhol, the proto-Pop Art began with radical ideas spurned by Picasso, Schwitters, Duchamp, and so on. For the amount of delusions of grandeur in, mixed with an ignorance of art history, there is not enough critical dialogue to keep it all checked and balanced.

Collectively, Michael Lee’s work is a creation of a steady stream of undulating energy and verve that underlie his own sense of sobriety and attitude towards corybantic urbanity. However, instead of exploring or self-projecting content often associated with urbanity in the form of angst, pain, decay, and so forth, Lee turns to more rhythmic, gentrified subject matters in simplified, geometric forms and shapes layered and built up with heavy staccato, impressionistic brushstrokes. The work of Ferney is one such example. A flat plane of interlocking lines and form creates the kind of volume and style familiar in Cubism but is contemporized by two dominant, if not discordant, negative spaces, fomenting a visual dialectic of irony, opposition, and tension while appearing remarkably timeless, even, primitively innocent.

What is largely absent in Lee’s recent body of work is the self-absorbed, adolescent shock-and-awe production the art world has become accustomed to, which is to say, the world is ceased being shocked and awed with its conditioned anticipation of both. Viewing Lee’s works is like paying a sacred homage to the likes of Arthur Dove, Helen Torr, and Cezanne, that ranges from vibrant colour-contrasting abstraction to elusive representational; however, the work shows us that underneath it lies something more subjectively primal and unbalanced, a push-and-pull dualism of Lee’s own internal, unresolved answers, but a flow of more question."

Sarah Park
November 2008
Zurich and Los Angeles

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