Lee Youngbin slowly transports the viewer into another world. She refuses to bow to a modern sense of time. She creates delicate, pure imagery with watercolour and Korean ink on paper. Using these traditional Korean materials, she depicts public bathhouses, the main focus of her recent work. Lee Youngbin's drawings use a similar technique to that of Egyptian hieroglyphics - where objects are drawn from the viewpoint at which they are most easily understood.
The emphasis on drawing the most important features of an object often means that their 'correctness' (or accuracy) in terms of perspective, scale or anatomy is compromised, but the emotional content is more deeply felt. The intricate details of each tile and the reduced scale of the figures to their surroundings create an equal existence away from socially defined roles.
The artist produces these works with complete honesty, facing her inner self. She gently induces and invites the viewer to feel the same way. Each line, each thought, each moment are protracted into a way of life that appears like a confession. "Ying" (shadows, darkness, negativity) is an important concept for Lee Youngbin: referring to the ideas that "summer comes when one survives winter". In travelling through her pictures, the viewer becomes enmeshed in this sense of survival. Lee Youngbin (born 1980, South Korea) lives and works in Seoul.