"LILYJON: WORKS AND DAYS"
2024.12.03 - 2024.12.08
Artist: Lilyjon
Cub_ism_ Artspace is pleased to present the artist LILYJON's solo project "LILYJON: WORKS AND DAYS" at 2024 Untitled Art Miami Beach. This is a continuation of LILYJON's ongoing project "LILYJON: SHALL THE RITUAL BEGIN", will exhibit from 3 December to 8 December 2024.
God, man, and non-man are one and the same. Darkness reveals light, sin reveals holiness, loneliness reveals love.
The Taste of Dark Clouds is concerned with the issues of "body" and "seeing" within art, as well as the issue of "human nature". In terms of subject matter, it also begins to put people in a "desperate situation", deifying and humanising them. The repeated use of the inverted triangle structure, while presenting the rhyming form of the poem, also generates a certain unstable sense of coercion and mystery. The precise correspondence of the diptychs, the control of structure, proportion and rhythm, the strict selection and repetition of various elements, where Lilyjon endeavours to establish strict proportions and forms similar to those of a thangka or an ancient Egyptian mural, to establish a kind of altar and ritual. The artist expects the viewer to enter a state of "seeing slowly", hoping that the gaze of the man in the painting will evoke the gaze of the viewer, while at the same time they will at some point realise that they are the voyeur pre-determined in the painting, accompanied by a sense of shame/guilt.
This exhibition is inspired by a novel recently read by the artist, called The Summer When General Winter Arrives. The story generates from female protagonist, who, after experiencing unspeakable pain and horror, imagines her deceased grandmother returning to accompany her. With her grandmother and her grandmother’s friends, she embarks on new adventures, through this, experiencing different interpretations of death. The installation, Whispering beneath the grandma’s quilt, extracts a part of what the grandmother says to the protagonist and the artist excerpt part of the text, forming a “woven letter.” The artist believes that these words, mixed with the grandmother’s fantasies from when she was alive, resemble a deeply private way for the protagonist to heal herself after the trauma which the artist gets healed in this process.
Between 2023 and 2024, Lilyjon tampered with the work in video form, creating Southerly Breeze Video, that nearly half an hour long. The artist breaks the linear narrative from the inside and re-tells another bizarre story through images, poems and dialogues scattered throughout the work. The video reveals the inner struggle of the characters and their search for the meaning of life, as well as the artist's profound thoughts on issues such as history and memory, youth and love, ideals and destiny, and death and transcendence.
LILYJON has been working on the series of "WORKS AND DAYS" since 2023, and three works of it will be exhibited at Untitled Art Miami Beach. The title of "Works and Days" comes from the ancient Greek poet Hesiod's poem "Works and Days" and "Theogony", which describes the daily labour and the change of time in the daily life of the ancients in the form of "oracles", and "Theogony", which recounts the birth of the universe and the gods, the struggles among the Olympian gods and the change of power. The "Work and Days" series is not limited to Greek mythology, but combines all the major mythological systems of the world, using legends, stories, poems, and the artist's own cryptic texts as sources of inspiration, while combining them with real-life experiences and encounters, to create a mysterious and personal mythology.
In "Work and Days" the artist demonstrates his creative "alchemy of concept and painting". It ostensibly depicts the work of the gods and the operation of the universe, but also records the artist's work and time; it is ostensibly a retrospection and reconstruction of myths, but also a sorting out and figurative expression of the derivation of "conceptual". The artist hopes to show the simultaneity of "past, present and future" in a vast and complicated length, so as to r eturn to some kind of origin, and to reflect on and interrogate the human nature nowadays.
Order comes from the transformation of discord. Is it pain or pleasure on the central fulcrum of balance?
In the retro-futuristic image,the golden triangle stands on top of it: balance under duress;the coiled snake: subduing evil, but at the same time a metaphor for eroticism;the eyes in the distance: human voyeurism and divine surveillance; Saturn or the flying saucer: the intrusion of an unidentified object, an element of disharmony. Unexpected and unrecognisable by the artist, therefore unexplainable; Cyber element: olive branch transformed into a cable and plugged into the body (thigh).
"Every artwork, without exception, is a historical artifact because it represents a specific stage in the development of visual arts." The understanding of historical artifacts is the same in reverse: people's lives and histories exist in continuous phases, with each phase containing the essence of the next. The artist’s creative process follows this similar pattern. Sonia's works are full of vitality, not in the literal sense of life, but rather as a form of continuity, placing them in the eternal flow of time through various forms and expressions. Ultimately, the seemingly fragmented content is not purely negative or sorrowful, but it represents the precious courage for collective healing after the smoke has cleared.
Artist's version of the myth: In the battle between Themis and Poseidon, Poseidon transforms the crystal clear water, which gives a sense of purity and coolness. Themis transformed the serpent of hatred into an olive tree full of golden branches and fruits, a tree that added to the feeling of peace. Themis won the race. Themis, standing on one foot on the golden triangle, maintains a delicate and perfect balance, as if one were looking at the scales of a goddess incarnate.
The stars, the sun, the moon and the floating organs, as far back as the beginning of chaos and the future of ruins. In this "cabinet of treasures", water, fire, thunder and lightning, discord and vows, tongue of thorns and hearing, hidden pain and grace, evil words and reconciliation, lust and holy wounds, measurement and confinement are placed. ...... The artist presents the beginning or the end of the "conceptual" system of human beings, the original state of emergence or the fragments remaining after its destruction. The past and the future occur simultaneously in the painting, the gods are working.
A Pseudo-Portrait: The artist depicts a pseudo-portrait of tug-of-war and strife beneath a calm surface, a Lilyjon version of a classic myth and a classic pictorial motif. The figure of Cronus is placed in the frame of the portrait by the artist, and the five children of the king are just five tiny planets mixed up with the stars, surrounding the giant god, like the rings of Saturn and debris. Compassion and rage, restraint and madness, desire and patience ...... are materialised and placed in a portrait.
A portrait: Lilyjon is an image that has been repeatedly portrayed by the artist, who tries to change it in this work. After considerable struggle and many efforts, the artist discovered that behind the synonym Lilyjon, there is a constant archetype that cannot be altered. Every time the artist tries to modify and deviate from this archetype, he is only "correcting" it again and getting closer to it - a huge and ancient soul, inviolable. It is scattered over a long and vast space and time, and it is always calling and guiding the return of its fragments. The artist cannot escape from it, just as the children consumed by Kronos cannot escape from their father - the children return to their father's body, the image returns to an archetype, the artist returns to a soul, and everything returns to the universe.
