2026 ACK ack ack ack: Artist-Critic Matching Program
Meet Me in Montauk
Meet Me in Montauk: 문소영
Original text by So Young Moon
Read the original text
번역: 김미혜
Translated by Mihye Kim
![[criticism] Meet Me in Montauk](https://cdn.imweb.me/upload/S202204293a6eb15f078f5/4ede3bf02981f.jpeg)
이영수, 침묵의 공간, 2022, Oil, cold wax on canvas, 227.3 × 182.8 cm.
Just as beginnings and endings are fictions to time which flows on endlessly, the completion of a painting may be, rather than an ending, a decision to stop at the point that feels most appropriate. Lee Youngsoo's work begins with particular memories, yet painting is not an attempt to preserve or hold onto them. What the artist tries to capture is not a specific moment in time or a particular subject, but rather fragments of the past that are felt through the skin and bones. Though these memories have receded too far to emerge as distinct images, the artist attends to sensations and emotions that continue to linger within the body. Painting appears at the point where present and past, memory and bodily movement intersect and accumulate. Rather than adopting recognizable forms or images, or explicitly revealing a personal narrative, Lee seeks to make visible the very process of tracing the flow of memory. While completed forms may unfold into metaphor or narrative, the materiality of the painting and the traces of its making draw the viewer into the act of painting itself. Memory is mutable. It fades with the passage of time and may come to be understood in entirely different ways through new experiences and events. Despite this continual transformation and erosion of memory, Lee discovers emotions and sensations that remain—at once vivid and numbed. Even when attempting to bring these sensations into form, faded memories hang like a veil, preventing them from fully coming into focus. Memory mediates between past and present, yet it does not exist as a clean, linear continuum. Embracing the capricious nature of memory, Lee attempts to draw out, through the movement of painting, the sensations left in the body by moments long past.
The ocean in Solaris immediately returns to those who behold it tangible forms of the emotions concealed deep within their gaze. While these forms may resemble the past and appear to recreate memory, they are in fact closer to summoning emotions and sensations, through the mediation of particular forms, that have long been repressed. Likewise, the pictorial narrative is shaped less by memory itself than by sensations accumulated over time. From the moment a painting leaves the painter's body, it becomes a question of how narrative, materiality, and sensation might be connected. In this process, Lee Youngsoo attends less to memory than to sensation. Rather than following forms in order to reconstruct events, the artist traces the emotional and sensory residues that make those forms possible. Memory and sensation may become entangled through an event or experience, yet at some point they may separate. What was once a sensation bound to an event may then remain adrift, like the residue of an emotion that has lost its object. Focusing not on sight itself but on sensations that elude both the eye and language, Lee attempts to bring the embodied traces of memory onto the pictorial surface without distortion. Emotions and sensations so vague that they retreat into the catch-all word "feeling" acquire material form through cold wax, oil paint, and brushwork. Yet if the narrative remains silent and the image retains only the traces of the artist's gestures, how is the viewer to receive it? How can sensation be conveyed through silence?
![[criticism] Meet Me in Montauk](https://cdn.imweb.me/upload/S202204293a6eb15f078f5/9a541db17abcb.jpeg)
![[criticism] Meet Me in Montauk](https://cdn.imweb.me/upload/S202204293a6eb15f078f5/bdb0baa28adde.png)
이영수, 각인된 감정과 신체 감각, 2021, Oil on canvas, 193.9 ×130.3 cm
이영수, 각인된 감정과 신체 감각, 2021, Oil and airbrush on canvas, 116.8 ×72.7 cm
이영수, 각인된 감정과 신체 감각, 2021, Oil on canvas, 193.9 ×130.3 cm
The summer wind and the damp smell of grass revive long-dormant emotions. Not all memories return as clear, linear narratives, yet sadness and joy, fear and excitement once felt remain as sensations within the scent and humidity of summer season. Embodied sensation is not subordinated to linear time; instead, it connects past and present. Lee Youngsoo looks into constantly shifting memory, attending to experiences and emotions that have slipped away from its flow. In this process, movements emerge that cannot be shaken off, yet can never become fully clear. The artist’s attempt to trace elusive bodily sensations through painting has continued over a long period. In his works from around 2020–2022, bodily movement, rather than materiality, tends to be expressed through brushwork. For example, <Residue> (2021) and <Embodied Trace> (2021) are works rendered with a more immediate, improvisational sensibility than his other works. These works unfold pre-reflective sensations directly onto the pictorial surface, yet it is precisely this immediacy that allows the flow of emotion to emerge without excess. Rather than memory reconstructing events, these works show the process in which sensations left in the body generate images.
![[criticism] Meet Me in Montauk](https://cdn.imweb.me/upload/S202204293a6eb15f078f5/1f325fc4059e7.jpeg)
이영수, 막, 2024, Oil, cold wax and paraffin wax on canvas, 193.9 ×130.3 cm
However, the narrative that can be expressed through brushwork is limited to bodily movement, and a fixed medium has its limits in conveying temporality that accumulates in layers. This limitation is to some extent addressed through the artist’s use of thick, residue-retaining materials such as wax or paraffin. What is important in Lee Youngsoo’s practice is not reaching any form of resolution, but rather exposing temporality and allowing painting to remain in a state of vitality. Yet how can the fluidity of time be revealed through the fixed surface of the canvas and the immobile substance of paint? The artist’s process of layering thin coats of paraffin, scraping them away, burning them, and then reapplying material inevitably involves chance—manifesting as unexpected forms and incidental scratches. Until the moment the artist stops, the painting remains in a state of continuous transformation. While figuration may unfold context, the artist instead seeks points of resolution through practice itself and the contingencies of material. Lee Youngsoo has consistently taken the limits of perception as the starting point of his work. Alongside this variation of material, the concept of the “veil” functions as an important operative term in his practice. <Membrane> (2024) stages a condition in which the more one attempts to materialize memory and sensation, the more they seem to be obstructed. The pictorial surface emerges as multiple layers of color accumulate lightly, as though covered by a faint veil. For the artist, the veil is both an element that blocks the pathway of image recollection and a threshold that suggests another dimension beyond perception. It is also a term that describes the layered structure of painting itself. For him, memory is always situated beyond the veil—never fully accessible, slipping away the more it is grasped. The paraffin accumulated on the surface functions as this veil, revealing multiple strata of traces and afterimages, simultaneously enacting both the blockage and the permeability of sensation.
![[criticism] Meet Me in Montauk](https://cdn.imweb.me/upload/S202204293a6eb15f078f5/5dff49a2bdc8a.jpeg)
이영수, Untitled, 2026, Oil, cold wax and paraffin wax on canvas, 227.3 × 182.8 cm.
In the artist’s recent work, forms have begun to appear that evoke parts of the body such as the spine and internal organs. These are regions that, both metaphorically and in medical terms, are closely responsive to the nervous system, and also feel like sites where invisible emotions swirl and churn. They can also evoke chakras, which map the flow of bodily energy. However, these references function less as attempts to reproduce specific forms than as triggers that awaken memories and sensations that had been submerged within the artist. Through minimal forms, the work draws out latent sensory experiences and responds immediately to the states that emerge from them. In this sense, what is important in Lee Youngsoo’s painting is not the form itself, but the way sensation moves across the pictorial surface through form as a mediator. Rather than organizing felt sensations into language, Lee seeks to contain them in the painting as they are. While the work unfolds across the canvas in an instinctive and sensory manner, such movements are handled with care so that they are not left unchecked or uncontrolled. What Lee attempts to bring out from this embodied sensibility is not merely an outlet for emotion, but an effort to understand the world through a fully personal language, rather than borrowed terms. With no framework or supporting language to rely on, the artist tries to turn the inside out. He wanders continuously at the intersection where ineffable sensations and blurred memories intersect and diverge.
Lee Youngsoo unfolds movements that arise through his body as if performing an improvised dance. Rather than adopting abstraction as a means of making a statement, this is an attempt to test, through action alone, what painting can do at a site where language cannot reach. Just as he once loosened the constraints of an earlier phase of his practice by transferring what had been expressed through brushwork into the density and unpredictability of cold wax and paraffin, the artist now moves one step further from an expressive phase, expanding his work toward leaving emotion itself on the canvas without relying on figuration. In Lee Youngsoo’s painting, what matters is not what the form signifies, but how it exists and what kinds of sensations it evokes. Within his work, memory and sensation are in constant collision and misalignment. Yet this misalignment is not something to be overcome; rather, it becomes the driving force of painting itself. Embodied sensations naturally summon corresponding images. In infinite time, beginnings and endings are only provisional conditions. Thus, in painting as well, completion is a matter of finding the most complete moment of pause. Lee's canvas likewise proceeds on the premise of continual movement. Painting becomes complete precisely by not arriving anywhere.
[1] 영화 <이터널 선샤인>(2004) 속 대사. 주인공들은 기억은 지워졌지만 마음에 잔류하는 감각을 따라 움직인다.
[2] 솔라리스의 바다는 인간의 기억과 죄책감, 트라우마를 형상으로 복제한다. 소설 속 과학자들은 이를 물질과 기억을 연결하는 의미 있는 발견으로 여겼지만, 연구가 진행될수록 솔라리스는 인간의 이해를 벗어나는 모호하고 공허한 세계로 드러난다. 크리스 앞에 나타난 죽은 아내 레야 (하레이) 역시 그의 기억과 고통으로부터 생성된 존재이지만, 정작 기억 자체는 갖고 있지 않다. 대신 크리스가 기억하는 행동과 감정의 흔적만이 몸에 남아 있으며, 자신이 왜 크리스 곁에 머무는지 알지 못한 채 그를 향한 감각적 끌림만을 따른다. 기억의 내용은 소실되었지만 감각은 지속되는 상태인 것이다. 솔라리스의 이러한 설정으로부터 기억과 물성을 연결하는 회화의 가능성과, 그 연결로부터 감각을 다시 분리해내는 이영수의 태도를 함께 살펴보았다.. Stanisław Lem, 1961, Solaris, trans. Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, (Walker and Company, 1970)
[3] 이영수, 침묵의 공간, 2022, 캔버스에 유화, 콜드 왁스, 227.3 × 182.8 cm.
[4] “신체의 윤곽이 드러나지만, 그것은 대상이라기보다 통로에 가깝다. 기억은 몸을 통과하며 형태를 잠시 빌려 나타났다가 다시 흐려진다.” 이영수 작가노트(2026) 중 발췌.
2026.8. ACK 발행. ACK (artcritickorea) 글의 저작권은 필자에게 있습니다. August. 2026. Published by ACK. The copyright of the article published by ACK is owned by its author.
2026 ACK ack ack ack: Artist-Critic Matching Program
Meet Me in Montauk
Meet Me in Montauk: 문소영
Original text by So Young Moon
Read the original text
번역: 김미혜
Translated by Mihye Kim
이영수, 침묵의 공간, 2022, Oil, cold wax on canvas, 227.3 × 182.8 cm.
Just as beginnings and endings are fictions to time which flows on endlessly, the completion of a painting may be, rather than an ending, a decision to stop at the point that feels most appropriate. Lee Youngsoo's work begins with particular memories, yet painting is not an attempt to preserve or hold onto them. What the artist tries to capture is not a specific moment in time or a particular subject, but rather fragments of the past that are felt through the skin and bones. Though these memories have receded too far to emerge as distinct images, the artist attends to sensations and emotions that continue to linger within the body. Painting appears at the point where present and past, memory and bodily movement intersect and accumulate. Rather than adopting recognizable forms or images, or explicitly revealing a personal narrative, Lee seeks to make visible the very process of tracing the flow of memory. While completed forms may unfold into metaphor or narrative, the materiality of the painting and the traces of its making draw the viewer into the act of painting itself. Memory is mutable. It fades with the passage of time and may come to be understood in entirely different ways through new experiences and events. Despite this continual transformation and erosion of memory, Lee discovers emotions and sensations that remain—at once vivid and numbed. Even when attempting to bring these sensations into form, faded memories hang like a veil, preventing them from fully coming into focus. Memory mediates between past and present, yet it does not exist as a clean, linear continuum. Embracing the capricious nature of memory, Lee attempts to draw out, through the movement of painting, the sensations left in the body by moments long past.
The ocean in Solaris immediately returns to those who behold it tangible forms of the emotions concealed deep within their gaze. While these forms may resemble the past and appear to recreate memory, they are in fact closer to summoning emotions and sensations, through the mediation of particular forms, that have long been repressed. Likewise, the pictorial narrative is shaped less by memory itself than by sensations accumulated over time. From the moment a painting leaves the painter's body, it becomes a question of how narrative, materiality, and sensation might be connected. In this process, Lee Youngsoo attends less to memory than to sensation. Rather than following forms in order to reconstruct events, the artist traces the emotional and sensory residues that make those forms possible. Memory and sensation may become entangled through an event or experience, yet at some point they may separate. What was once a sensation bound to an event may then remain adrift, like the residue of an emotion that has lost its object. Focusing not on sight itself but on sensations that elude both the eye and language, Lee attempts to bring the embodied traces of memory onto the pictorial surface without distortion. Emotions and sensations so vague that they retreat into the catch-all word "feeling" acquire material form through cold wax, oil paint, and brushwork. Yet if the narrative remains silent and the image retains only the traces of the artist's gestures, how is the viewer to receive it? How can sensation be conveyed through silence?
이영수, 각인된 감정과 신체 감각, 2021, Oil on canvas, 193.9 ×130.3 cm
이영수, 각인된 감정과 신체 감각, 2021, Oil and airbrush on canvas, 116.8 ×72.7 cm
이영수, 각인된 감정과 신체 감각, 2021, Oil on canvas, 193.9 ×130.3 cm
The summer wind and the damp smell of grass revive long-dormant emotions. Not all memories return as clear, linear narratives, yet sadness and joy, fear and excitement once felt remain as sensations within the scent and humidity of summer season. Embodied sensation is not subordinated to linear time; instead, it connects past and present. Lee Youngsoo looks into constantly shifting memory, attending to experiences and emotions that have slipped away from its flow. In this process, movements emerge that cannot be shaken off, yet can never become fully clear. The artist’s attempt to trace elusive bodily sensations through painting has continued over a long period. In his works from around 2020–2022, bodily movement, rather than materiality, tends to be expressed through brushwork. For example, <Residue> (2021) and <Embodied Trace> (2021) are works rendered with a more immediate, improvisational sensibility than his other works. These works unfold pre-reflective sensations directly onto the pictorial surface, yet it is precisely this immediacy that allows the flow of emotion to emerge without excess. Rather than memory reconstructing events, these works show the process in which sensations left in the body generate images.
이영수, 막, 2024, Oil, cold wax and paraffin wax on canvas, 193.9 ×130.3 cm
However, the narrative that can be expressed through brushwork is limited to bodily movement, and a fixed medium has its limits in conveying temporality that accumulates in layers. This limitation is to some extent addressed through the artist’s use of thick, residue-retaining materials such as wax or paraffin. What is important in Lee Youngsoo’s practice is not reaching any form of resolution, but rather exposing temporality and allowing painting to remain in a state of vitality. Yet how can the fluidity of time be revealed through the fixed surface of the canvas and the immobile substance of paint? The artist’s process of layering thin coats of paraffin, scraping them away, burning them, and then reapplying material inevitably involves chance—manifesting as unexpected forms and incidental scratches. Until the moment the artist stops, the painting remains in a state of continuous transformation. While figuration may unfold context, the artist instead seeks points of resolution through practice itself and the contingencies of material. Lee Youngsoo has consistently taken the limits of perception as the starting point of his work. Alongside this variation of material, the concept of the “veil” functions as an important operative term in his practice. <Membrane> (2024) stages a condition in which the more one attempts to materialize memory and sensation, the more they seem to be obstructed. The pictorial surface emerges as multiple layers of color accumulate lightly, as though covered by a faint veil. For the artist, the veil is both an element that blocks the pathway of image recollection and a threshold that suggests another dimension beyond perception. It is also a term that describes the layered structure of painting itself. For him, memory is always situated beyond the veil—never fully accessible, slipping away the more it is grasped. The paraffin accumulated on the surface functions as this veil, revealing multiple strata of traces and afterimages, simultaneously enacting both the blockage and the permeability of sensation.
이영수, Untitled, 2026, Oil, cold wax and paraffin wax on canvas, 227.3 × 182.8 cm.
In the artist’s recent work, forms have begun to appear that evoke parts of the body such as the spine and internal organs. These are regions that, both metaphorically and in medical terms, are closely responsive to the nervous system, and also feel like sites where invisible emotions swirl and churn. They can also evoke chakras, which map the flow of bodily energy. However, these references function less as attempts to reproduce specific forms than as triggers that awaken memories and sensations that had been submerged within the artist. Through minimal forms, the work draws out latent sensory experiences and responds immediately to the states that emerge from them. In this sense, what is important in Lee Youngsoo’s painting is not the form itself, but the way sensation moves across the pictorial surface through form as a mediator. Rather than organizing felt sensations into language, Lee seeks to contain them in the painting as they are. While the work unfolds across the canvas in an instinctive and sensory manner, such movements are handled with care so that they are not left unchecked or uncontrolled. What Lee attempts to bring out from this embodied sensibility is not merely an outlet for emotion, but an effort to understand the world through a fully personal language, rather than borrowed terms. With no framework or supporting language to rely on, the artist tries to turn the inside out. He wanders continuously at the intersection where ineffable sensations and blurred memories intersect and diverge.
Lee Youngsoo unfolds movements that arise through his body as if performing an improvised dance. Rather than adopting abstraction as a means of making a statement, this is an attempt to test, through action alone, what painting can do at a site where language cannot reach. Just as he once loosened the constraints of an earlier phase of his practice by transferring what had been expressed through brushwork into the density and unpredictability of cold wax and paraffin, the artist now moves one step further from an expressive phase, expanding his work toward leaving emotion itself on the canvas without relying on figuration. In Lee Youngsoo’s painting, what matters is not what the form signifies, but how it exists and what kinds of sensations it evokes. Within his work, memory and sensation are in constant collision and misalignment. Yet this misalignment is not something to be overcome; rather, it becomes the driving force of painting itself. Embodied sensations naturally summon corresponding images. In infinite time, beginnings and endings are only provisional conditions. Thus, in painting as well, completion is a matter of finding the most complete moment of pause. Lee's canvas likewise proceeds on the premise of continual movement. Painting becomes complete precisely by not arriving anywhere.
[1] 영화 <이터널 선샤인>(2004) 속 대사. 주인공들은 기억은 지워졌지만 마음에 잔류하는 감각을 따라 움직인다.
[2] 솔라리스의 바다는 인간의 기억과 죄책감, 트라우마를 형상으로 복제한다. 소설 속 과학자들은 이를 물질과 기억을 연결하는 의미 있는 발견으로 여겼지만, 연구가 진행될수록 솔라리스는 인간의 이해를 벗어나는 모호하고 공허한 세계로 드러난다. 크리스 앞에 나타난 죽은 아내 레야 (하레이) 역시 그의 기억과 고통으로부터 생성된 존재이지만, 정작 기억 자체는 갖고 있지 않다. 대신 크리스가 기억하는 행동과 감정의 흔적만이 몸에 남아 있으며, 자신이 왜 크리스 곁에 머무는지 알지 못한 채 그를 향한 감각적 끌림만을 따른다. 기억의 내용은 소실되었지만 감각은 지속되는 상태인 것이다. 솔라리스의 이러한 설정으로부터 기억과 물성을 연결하는 회화의 가능성과, 그 연결로부터 감각을 다시 분리해내는 이영수의 태도를 함께 살펴보았다.. Stanisław Lem, 1961, Solaris, trans. Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, (Walker and Company, 1970)
[3] 이영수, 침묵의 공간, 2022, 캔버스에 유화, 콜드 왁스, 227.3 × 182.8 cm.
[4] “신체의 윤곽이 드러나지만, 그것은 대상이라기보다 통로에 가깝다. 기억은 몸을 통과하며 형태를 잠시 빌려 나타났다가 다시 흐려진다.” 이영수 작가노트(2026) 중 발췌.
2026.8. ACK 발행. ACK (artcritickorea) 글의 저작권은 필자에게 있습니다. August. 2026. Published by ACK. The copyright of the article published by ACK is owned by its author.