Half/Half  is a participatory exhibition in which the artist Dongi Lee and children complete a painting together. As a Pop artist, Dongi Lee has been creating works deconstructing boundaries while moving between popular culture and art, the original and copies, originality and copying, reality and the virtual, and the past and present. In this exhibition, the artist deals with the collision and fusion of institutional art and non-institutional art based on an art realm he has been creating. As a representative of institutional art, he graduated from art school and works as a professional painter, he chose the purity of children, not yet tied to the framework of art education, to represent the extra institutional. The works are exhibited in incomplete states. Literally, the artist first paints half the works and children paint the other half during the exhibition. Even the unpredictable process, as well as the results many children will complete while freely painting, will become the artwork.
 

The artist paints images he appropriates and creates from several online and offline media, including images of angels, cats, robots, puppies, dinosaurs, Chupa Chups, apps, and cartoons. The vaguely connected motifs and the pictures, which children will make as they wish using their imagination, will end up remaining in a canvas of the same territory. We hope you will enjoy the unpredictable coincidences and harmony manifested in the process.

 

The Artist
Dongi Lee was born in Seoul in 1967 and graduated from the Western painting departments of the Hongik University College of Fine Arts and Graduate School. The first artist to introduce cartoon images in Korean contemporary art, he is famous for the character Atomaus, created in 1993 by synthesizing America’s Mickey Mouse and Japan’s Atom. He presented the original genre of socially participatory pop art crisscrossing the boundary between high and low culture by borrowing and blending various elements from advertising, the Internet, classics, Modernist painting, and abstract art.