The constant.

The only constant in my life is change.  Change will come and I've managed to deal with it well. Even times when it doesn't come, I force it to happen.  I get antsy with the comfortable life but maybe I'm just scared of being normal.  My greatest fear growing up was dying alone, but these days, I seek solitude and fear being like everyone else.  In Princeton, we all drive to the same place; Target or Trader Joe's.  Anytime of the day, its like an apocalypse is about to happen.  Families frantically stocking up on their produce and dry products.  We've been having bi-weekly trips to New York and even with the congestion and traffic, its a bit of fresh air.  The only city that I feel comfortable calling home.  Even with all those changes to Flatbush avenue, Brooklyn is still the borough I spent 10 of my past 35 years in.  35 going on 36.  It's odd because I feel 50 plus and I realize I'm only in my mid thirties.

I spent the early half of my 30's in South Korea.  Within the small country, we've managed to move 3 times.  Seoul is a city I can't remember entirely.  Everything that's happened within the past 5 and a half years seem like it all took place within a vacuum.  Nightly drinking binges, afternoon rice wine binges, the chain smoking, karaoke rooms and chicken delivery.  You can have just about anything delivered in Korea and just about anything is open till the early morning.  Cost of going out is moderately cheap.

Moving back to the states, so much and so little has changed.  Maybe I was never the savvy business man, or the serious artist but navigating the world of entrepreneurship and self-promotion has become harder than when I had left.  When I left back in 2010, these are some of the things I did not own:

1. iphone
2. instagram account
3. linkedin account
4. etsy account
5. pinterest account
6. chairish account

I think I'm forgetting a couple of accounts but yeah, never have I had so many accounts before.  And quite frankly, none are making me any richer or more famous.

Yesterday I opened up a GIPHY account and started uploading some videos and turning them into GIFs.








With so many outlets, the biggest challenge will be editing the ways we approach business or self-promotion.  The other challenge will be to carefully curate the way we utilize this new way of living.
Some days I feel as if I'm trapped within my instagram feed.  Other days I want to drift to sleep and dream.  But the world is not the way I left it, and it will never be that way again.

decade of what has become.

The decade of my twenties was filled with art school, marriage, work and kids.  The ten years that make up my twenties where each year drastically differs from the next was one big mashup of all things that I have become.  I always thought I'd be in my twenties forever, but we all know that it only lasts 10 years.

During that time, I had quit my job twice at the same company.  I never saw myself permanently fixed to one place and found it quite boring.  The first time I had quit was in 2006.  My mother had become a little sick, but now I think of it, it wasn't big enough to really impact my decision.  Maybe it was just an excuse but I left my first real world job and decided to become a full-time writer slash artist.


My days were spent like so:

I would wake up as my girlfriend went to her job.  I sat in front of the typewriter and begin brainstorming and doing writing exercises.  

Later I would sit in front of the computer and work on some videos.  

I would leave for Kim's Video on St. Mark's Street and rent 3 dvds.  I would come home and watch one of the three films and burn a copy of the other two to watch at a later day.  

After watching the movie, I would sit behind the typewriter again and try to finish 10 pages of a screenplay that I was working on.  I figured that writing 10 pages a day, I would eventually have a solid script in about one month.  



Days were a lot longer then.  I wasn't confined to a set schedule nor did I have to accommodate anyone else's time.  It was just me and my writing.

I ended up writing 3 screenplays but nothing ever materialized from it.  I had made some videos that would get played somewhere but nowhere big.  I started my website www.botheman.com which I still keep updated but by the end of that year, I was back at the job I had left.  I was married and needed a steady form of income.

I've never enjoyed that much solitude since and once in a while, I think back at that year.  Its something that I would unlikely see anytime soon; time just for me and no one else.  No obligations but the ones that I made for myself.  A bit selfish but I think we all need to be at one point or another.

The culmination of the 10 years rolled straight into my 30's.  I sit here a bit puzzled at where the time went but I can only smile at the results.  Just today I pretended to be a girl named Lisa, playing make believe with my six year old daughter.  I would never trade that in for anything, not even a years worth of watching movies, chain smoking and typing stories on my typewriter.

The last year of my youth.

I had just graduated art school and living at my girlfriend's place in Brooklyn Heights.  I was sending out resumes to every company I could find and figured I should just get a part-time job at Banana Republic to help pay the bills.  Our relationship was a bit scattered.  Living together brought out the worst in us.  I spent half of the day stuffing envelopes with resumes and the other half playing street fighter on my xbox.

I had an interview at Artisan for an intern position that would lead to a script reading gig which failed to materialize.  I also interviewed at a tape house where I would spend the day making dubs and digitizing footage.  Luckily, I had failed that interview as well.  I eventually got an apprentice job at a post-production house where I would work for the next five years and where I would eventually start my career as a video editor.

While at work, I would post videos online of films I had done in school.  For the entirety of my life thus far, I wanted to be a film director.  I wanted to make movies.  Movies that mass amounts of people would want to go watch.  I wanted to show at Sundance and thought Miramax was going to buy the film.  I would then go on to direct Gwyneth Paltrow and make a boat load of cash.

I always considered myself a storyteller.  I even wrote a script after graduating school but now that I think about it, it seems too lynchian even for David's taste.  I never had the discipline to hone my craft.  A little too passive to be the passionate director who sells his own blood to finance his films.  Never really had the guts to just put everything out there and give it all I had.  I always felt a little restraint.

I felt comfortable at work, with my career and with my life.  I had met someone who I wanted to eventually marry, settle down with.  My weekends were filled with booze and drugs and I was just happy to be in New York, enjoying the moment.

My girlfriend and I would hole up in my room smoking and drinking coffee, watching Jim Jarmusch films.  Along with my roommate, we would go on excursions through the outer reaches of Brooklyn to return our cablevision convertor box and take extra long detours to Boston.

We walked along the Brooklyn Heights promenade, snapping 120 film with her seagull, and I using a holga to capture our life moments.

The thought of becoming this star director just sort of left me but I always wanted to make movies and that will never change.

When I was 22, I thought I had everything figured out.  If I could travel back in time, there would be so many things I would tell myself, but I would have done it all the same.  I didn't listen to anybody and sure as hell wouldn't have listened to my future self.

The little moments are what we live for.  It instantaneously hits all of your senses and your emotions are overwhelmed.  I think about my life thus far and I think about when I was 22.

I've always been interested in the studio spaces of other artists.  Its where ideas are brought to life and lately, I've been wanting to develop my own studio.  I've for the most part of my artistic life, made video art work that dealt with collaging of found footage.  But more recently, I've been shooting a lot more and because of my developing painting and drawing work, I'm feeling quite cramped in my current situation.

Paul Klein and information absorbtion.

I have been on a binge to be constructive and looking for useful material anywhere possible.  Youtube seems like a great place to start so I type "artistic process" in the search.  The first video is of Ryan Mcginness and his creative process.  The video soon ends and automatically starts a video called "Tracey Emin: What Artists do all day."  Interesting, so I watch both parts 1 and 2.  Then a suggested video pops up on the side.  "Paul Klein on how to succeed as an artist." Never really keen on self-help and the likes but what harm could it do.  Best 40mins spent.  And I got around to follow one of his advice which was to write an artist statement, but to remember that you can write a new artist statement the next month, the next day or the next minute if you want to.  The artist statement can be an on-going process, but just write one.  And so I did, and here I will share it...

(please remember that this is the first draft, very rough and haven't been checked over...I am also very self-conscious, thank you)

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ARTIST STATEMENT:

Bo Lee, is a visual artist with an emphasis in video.  

I have always wanted to make movies.  I thought I was going to become a hollywood director and be commercially successful by 28.  I was always attracted to the story and felt that I had plenty of stories to tell.  I went to art school and continued my path to becoming a film director.  I worked as an editor for commercials and films but soon quit to write a screenplay.  During this time, I had made a bunch of films and had them up on a website.  I began to receive calls about showing my work.  But they were never from film festivals or people interested in narrative work but from galleries and curators.  In a sense, my work always belonged to the video art world.  I’ve always wanted to make feature length films but I guess I was better at making abstract, short, films that sometimes looped and sometimes didn’t.  In 2006, I began to take my video art more seriously.  I saw myself drifting from the narrative structure and experimenting more with visual aesthetics and form.  

My studio work was side-tracked a bit by marriage, children and needing to make rent and soon found myself in South Korea.  In Korea, I had found a renewed sense in my work and began developing my skills.  Painting, wood-working, welding and began playing with different materials and resources.  I had a furniture business that allowed me to develop my social and salesmanship skills which in turn helped me become a more balanced artist in terms of knowing how to market the work that I was creating and realizing that making artwork was only a small portion of the artist that I wanted to become.  I began to make paintings, drawings, sculptures but ultimately, thinks all of that is a way to develop my video work.  

I think in terms of space and time and story is still important to me.  When I paint or draw, I try to develop my other senses.  I try to block out the time aspect because its no longer relevant in painting.  I think more in terms of composition, techniques and movement.  I’m more attracted to shapes and forms.  I may or may not want to make a statement but in video, I almost always want to say something.  I’ve always trained myself to think that way, so that the videos serve a purpose outside of just plain visuals.  My paintings and drawings are a bit different.  Maybe because I’ve only been utilizing the canvas for a lot less of a period, but I’m more stable when I begin to work with a painting.  I’m more at peace and allow myself to act differently.  And its because of this contradiction almost that intrigues me about me.  I think we inherently have contradictions that we try to justify or change but never acknowledge those contradictions and allow it to just be.  I can’t sell my videos nor do I want to.  I would rather play them for free and hope that someone will see it and get some sort of reaction out of them.  My paintings, drawings and sculptures I want to make money from.  I want to be accepted in the art market.  I want to be part of its culture and draw inspiration from them.  

In five years, I want to have sold enough paintings and artwork to be able to call myself a professional.  I want to have several shows, group or solo and some fair exposure.  I want to be able to do this to allow freedom for my videos to be shown.  

In ten years, I want to be able to make or already have made a feature length film.

I want to think in terms of projects, themes and exhibition ideas.  I want to see my body of work, complimenting each other.  Everything is in sync.  The timing and rhythm.  

Goldmine Studios and the start of something new

We've all started blogs before and I am no exception.  I've started and closed many blogs; topics ranging from cinema to things that make me angry but this time I tell myself it will be different.  I've changed my habits over the years and learned how to focus.  Studied the masters before me and have considered not even starting a new blog.  But....  I have thought long and hard and have decided to start a new blog and link it to our site for a new gallery space we have opened up.  

Background information:

I am Bo Lee.  I am a video artist.  I went to Pratt Institute.  For the past five years, I have been in South Korea and recently opened up a gallery space, calling it Goldmine Studios.  (www.goldmine-studios.com)  The mission of this gallery space is to support emerging and new artists and promote creative growth locally.  

Reason for this blog:

I know there are plenty of blogs on art criticism.  I know there are plenty of blogs with artist's thoughts on a particular show or exhibition.  I'm not going to say this blog will be any different, but what I can say is that I hope the readers will come along with me on this ride.  I've started something new and I'm going to continue down this path for the forceable future.  There will be obstacles and many ups and downs but in the end, all I want is to learn, grow and hopefully record the information I collect.