Man Soo Lee is a professor of art from Seoul, graduate of the prestigious Hong-ik University, and for twenty years an educator at Sungshin Women’s University. His students, mostly women but including some men, regularly reflect that he was thoughtful, sensitive and highly attuned to their needs.
During childhood he regularly drew people he would see around, recording what they were doing. How they lived, showing them being close, or fighting. Today, there are once again all kinds of different people in his paintings, doing various things.
The most frequent comment made about his striking exhibit in January of 2014 is that his work is so very relaxing. Beyond this each painting carries this value consistently, so that each work possesses the same strength of calm, the sort of work that could be installed in nearly any environment, without much chance of conflict with the surroundings. It is no small feat to smoothly mesh through insular integrity rather than by being complimentary. He explains that the work is probably relaxing because it relaxes him to make it, and the work is done very slowly, over a prolonged period of time. He reflects that as modernity intensifies in Korea, everyone wants to go faster and faster. He seeks to moderate this, but just a little. “We can’t deny the world around us as it is, but we can make adjustments in our immediate surroundings.”