"Red, Green and Blue" Lights Up Vancouver Art Gallery’s Offsite

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Khan Lee, "Red, Green, Blue," 2016

site-specific installation at Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite, Photo by Pardeep Singh

Vancouver Art Gallery’s new public artwork Red, Green and Blue by artist Khan Lee lights up the Gallery’s Offsite in the heart of downtown Vancouver. On view from now until April 17, 2017, this movement-based sculpture installation uses filtered light to animate nature. Drawing on broad references of horizon lines and landscape, the artist allows passersby to visualize the wind.

Building on a sense of theatricality, Khan Lee’s installation acts as an elaborate set composed of three-dimensional objects that cast larger-than-life shadows against an enormous backdrop. Red, Green and Blue draws viewers into the intersections of artifice and nature with an abundant field of transparent cones fabricated from sheets of hand-folded plastic film. It is both painting and sculpture, using light filtered through red, green and blue lighting gels to project an immersive field of coloured, grass-like forms on the architecture of Offsite.

Although an oasis literally refers to the greenery within a desert, it also describes a peaceful location or imagined place where one might escape the rigours of everyday life. Lee’s oasis unfolds into an array of colourful and contemplative possibilities that break up the monotony of grey surroundings.

Offsite: Khan Lee is presented as part of Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures, a triennial exhibition surveying contemporary art in Vancouver presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery from December 3, 2016 to April 17, 2017.

About the artist

Khan Lee produces sculpture, video, installation and performance art, which frequently draws on everyday objects and situations. Stacks of ceramic plates, three-dimensional reliefs composed of pencils and melted eyeglasses, stuffed socks and mounds of acrylic caulking are some of the materials with which Lee playfully explores formal arrangements. His film and video works also address the specificity of the medium, in some cases exploiting the materiality and durational nature of the moving image.

Lee was born in Seoul and studied architecture at Hongik University before moving to Vancouver, where he studied art at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Recent exhibitions of his work have taken place at Kamloops Art Gallery; Centre A, Vancouver; and Surrey Art Gallery. Lee is a founding member of the Vancouver-based artist collective Intermission and a member of the Instant Coffee artist collective. Lee is represented by Republic Gallery, Vancouver.

About Offsite

Offsite is the Vancouver Art Gallery’s outdoor public art space located at 1100 West Georgia Street between Thurlow and Bute Streets, west of the Shangri-La Hotel, in downtown Vancouver. Presenting an innovative program of temporary projects, it is a site for local and international contemporary artists to exhibit works related to the surrounding urban context. Featured artists consider the site-specific potential of art within the public realm and respond to the changing social and cultural conditions of our contemporary world. New projects are installed in the spring and fall of each year. Offsite: Khan Lee is the fourteenth installation in the Gallery's Offsite series, curated by Diana Freundl, Associate Curator, Asian Art.

Offsite is organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and funded by the City of Vancouver through the Public Art Program. The Gallery recognizes Ian Gillespie, President, Westbank; Ben Yeung, President, Peterson Investment Group; and Residents of the Shangri-La for their support of this space.  

Source: Vancouver Art Gallery