Michael S. Lee, LA CITTÀ CHE NON C’È

Room 6

My artwork digests the idea of the city into a theme. The drawing is self-generated, taking a moment from memory and imagination and producing a system from experiences. In this way, I quantify the interactions of a series of structures into a pattern. The work does not have a goal. It starts with a simple balcony or structure and repeats itself, to rebuild and invent. I sit down with a pen in my hand and inscribe the most moving memories, and then create a context where they can proliferate. I ask the city how it wants to grow, how it wants to function, and how it wants to show itself. The drawing is self-generated. Like Italo Calvino’s fragments of Venice in Città Invisibili (Invisible Cities), these constructions take a point of interest and process it outwards and inwards. Outwards, like a detail, which becomes a starting point. Inwards, as these new themes prepare the ground for new human interactions in unusual environments. In this way I become my own memory. I see and imagine, and so I see again. The stage is made for a thematic development for the spectator. I make a high level of detail for an intense experience, but I cover and cut some parts of the formations. The idea of the cities goes beyond the medium, the viewers can interpret and imagine continuing the work through the depth of black.
Michael S. Lee

The ethical awareness of the value of “craft” work gives Michael S. Lee’s artistic research an attention to detail in which making and thinking are integrated with equal dignity. His drawings of cities are self-generated from a minimal element, triggered by memory, through a sort of automatic writing. The elaboration of the starting element takes place contextually towards the outside and the inside in an aesthetic and intellectual research that leads him to the creation of complex drawings and installations.
Loris Schermi

Michael S. Lee was born in 1988 in New York where he attended Cornell University to study architecture. He worked in South America in the summer of 2008 and now lives in Brooklyn, alternating between trips to Rome and Seoul. He specialises in drawing and installations. He exhibited at Palazzo Lazzaroni in Rome in 2009, at the Festa dell’Architettura in 2010 and in the same year at the Hartell Gallery Ithaca in New York.