Yongjae Lee’s chalkboard works initially depart from
Latvian-American artist Vija Celmins’ Blackboard Tableau series.
Appropriating Celmins’ forms, Lee employs different materials
and imbues them with personal images and narratives,
shifting the original context. ‘Borrowing’ and ‘tracing’ do not
remain in the realm of imitation but become part of a method
of reconstructing existing forms into a subjective painterly
language.

Although A Plan might appear to be a preparatory sketch for
Dark Slow Lightning, the work was in fact created after the
completion of the latter. This temporal inversion where the
plan emerges after the final work demonstrates the artist’s
conception of time, in which process and result are not bound
by linear order.