Curatorial Statement

Faucet Chronicles: Solidarity in Tears

A Community of “Sad-Funny” (Utppeum)

We live, it seems, in an era of radical self-reliance and relentless self-optimization. From physical appearance to one’s “mood,” self-management has become obligatory. Emotions that are too intense or too prolonged are seen to hinder productivity. In this sense, emotion is treated as an obstacle to work. Neither the joy of love nor the sorrow of loss—however profoundly they enrich the human soul—offers any measurable benefit to labor. As Eva Illouz has argued, within what she terms “emotional capitalism,” emotions are understood as both a capacity to be managed and a form of capital to be cultivated. In a time when traditional rites of passage have largely lost their significance, the ability to regulate one’s emotions is itself regarded as a qualification for adulthood.

To display one’s emotions in public, for instance, is often deemed unprofessional, immature, and—perhaps most tellingly—“feminine.” Tears are treated almost as a transgression. The tearful young reporter Joo Hyun-young became, in this regard, a cultural symptom, embodying a widely shared sensibility of our time. Faced with the fear that such unrestrained, uncontrollable emotional “leakage” might lead to social exclusion, we often turn to therapy or psychopharmacological interventions. These therapeutic practices, which intensify emotional discipline from within the subject, function as highly effective techniques of governance, facilitating the absorption of what was once considered a private domain into the circuits of capital. We now strive to recover from negative emotions as quickly as possible—not for their own resolution, but simply in order to return to work. In an age of surveillance capitalism, where all aspects of life must be controlled and calculated, emotion comes to be regarded as a variable, even a defect, inherent to the human condition.

As is well known, Sigmund Freud warned of a “problematic” form of melancholy that approaches a death drive. We have all encountered those who are “too” sorrowful—lying down, weeping, incapable of speech or action. Such extreme passivity appears pathological insofar as it contributes nothing to the maintenance of social order. At the same time, the public display of such grief can be perceived as dangerous: it recalls our own experiences of loss and unfinished mourning. Tears, in this way, call upon others to share responsibility for loss, to weep together. They are, from the outset, communal in nature. A single tear summons the entire history of tears that have ever existed. Though excessive emotion is regarded as problematic in our time, it is precisely through emotion that we connect to others and to the world as public beings—indeed, that we are able to imagine what lies beyond oppressive systems. Negative emotions, in particular, function like a sharp spike[1] protruding from the smooth fabric of a world that otherwise appears to run seamlessly.

From this perspective, the artist Lee Eun-kyung opens, through this exhibition, a public space for ambivalent emotions—difficult to articulate in language—originating from experiences of personal loss and “discord.[2]” Rather than persuading the viewer through coherent argument or discursive clarity, she confronts them with the sheer force of painting: a mass of crying faces, stripped of metaphor. Faces on the verge of bursting into tears; tightly clenched, angered faces too rigid to cry; swollen eyes rendered almost cartoonishly; figures playing amid endless rolls of toilet paper as though in an amusement park; trembling faces struggling to suppress tears; and faces awkwardly attempting to contain tears already spilled—together forming an almost encyclopedic taxonomy of tears.

Writing on the idea of a “public temple for weeping,” Anne Boyer emphasizes the necessity of spaces where anyone may come and cry—spaces in which “individual yet shared grief can be physically expressed.”[3] She further recounts how, due to the side effects of cancer treatment, she herself became a “portable public temple of tears.” In a similar vein, Lee’s paintings summon viewers—who have, at some point in their lives, wept intensely from loss or pain—into a temporary community of tears, functioning as a kind of “miniature portable public temple.”

Yet tears are not all that inhabit Lee’s work. Her paintings are disarmingly direct. They do not rely on opaque symbolism or elusive suggestion. Executed with an immediacy that suggests spontaneity, her works express and release the dense intensities of life—its sorrow and joy alike—much like tears themselves, which cannot be hidden or halted. If “tears” mark the point at which ambivalence explodes, her paintings likewise engage with paradox as a fundamental condition of life, where presence and absence, joy and sorrow intersect and coexist.

This paradox is made possible through humor and wit. The large face installed at the exhibition’s entrance condenses this logic. Folded in a manner reminiscent of a child’s playful manipulation of a banknote, the image shifts depending on the viewer’s angle. Installed to be viewed from below, the face appears not as one crying, but as awkwardly contorted into an exaggerated smile. As the title Don’t Cry suggests, this is a “sad-funny”[4] attempt to interrupt sorrow through physical distortion. It contains both a self-mocking gesture toward the artist—who cries like a “faucet”—and a stubborn insistence that the original expression can never truly be altered. These two conditions remain tightly intertwined. The boundary between laughter and tears is inseparable, like the interlocking surfaces of a lenticular image. Put simply, this is what life is. Lee understands well the paradox that explosive laughter may be another version of a scream.[5] Humor, then, becomes the smallest possible aperture through which we can continue to breathe—an opening no larger than the eye of a needle, through which a faint, involuntary chuckle escapes.

Even in works depicting sorrow, Lee does not relinquish mechanisms that evoke amusement. This holds true both for her daily drawing practice and for the scroll painting.[6] Hogokdo, whose title references Park Ji-won’s notion of a “place fit for weeping.”[7] In this work, tears are expended to the point of excess, culminating in a dramatic reunion. This inverted vision of a “hellscape,” rendered through an overwhelming cascade of tears, offers the viewer a form of cathartic release—returning to the original meaning of catharsis itself.

Meanwhile, the kinetic installation Pacific-like, Volcano-like stages repeated moments of encounter, as two large faces move toward and away from each other. Here again, without relying on subtext, Lee presents the sheer fact of encounter. To cry alone is lonely; to be seen crying alone is unbearably shameful. While becoming two does not resolve the situation, it at least mitigates isolation. As the number grows—from two to three—tears may shift into awkward laughter, or erupt into collective weeping, as seen in works like Midsommar or Parable of the Sower. If we weep to the extent that we must build vessels simply to avoid drowning in our own tears, then surely something will have changed.

As Fernando Pessoa wrote, “The world belongs to those who do not feel.”[8] For those who feel “too much,” the world is filled with the irreducible particularities of others—their pain, their joy—things that cannot be dismissed or stepped over like stones. For those who do not feel, however, the world becomes merely a screen upon which to project their own individuality. The figures in Lee’s paintings—those who cry excessively because they feel excessively—may not embody an ethics of alterity so much as a condition of unavoidable sensitivity. Regardless of the reason, within the norms of society, they are already marked for exclusion. For this “tribe of tears,” even a minimal world is not guaranteed. What remains, then, is only each other.

And perhaps that is enough. Even if they throw tear-stained tissues and used rolls of toilet paper at one another, laughing, no one will pay them any attention. What Lee ultimately constructs is a utopia built from “sad-funny” tears.

- Lee Yeonsuk (Rita)

lek5123@snu.ac.kr | @lek5123

Education

2026    M.F.A. Oriental Painting, Seoul National University, Seoul

2018    B.F.A. Oriental Painting, Seoul National University, Seoul

Solo Exhibitions

2026    Faucet Chronicles: Solidarity in Tears, OCI Museum of Art, Seoul

Selected Group Exhibitions    

2025    dYap2025 (DTC Young Artist Project), DTC Art Center, Daejeon

A Song for Those Who Do Not Sleep_Nocturne, Jeonnam International Sumuk Biennale, Mokpo

           Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, Woosuk Gallery, Seoul

2024    Unfinished Case, Woosuk Gallery, Seoul

Pulled Out Teeth and Planted Them in New Soil, Gwanak Residence Halls Art Dorm, Seoul

2023    You Don’t Even Know, Gwanak Residence Halls Art Dorm, Seoul

2019    Outstanding Graduates Exhibition of Art Universities in Seoul & Gyeonggi, Dongduk Art Gallery, Seoul

Awards / Honors

2025    Selected as 2026 OCI YOUNG CREATIVES, OCI Museum of Art, Seoul