Sungkok Art Museum has been operating the Sungkok Art Museum Open Call program to discover and support young artists and curators since 2021. This year, three artists were selected, Lee Eun, Lee Jinyoung, and Park Jaehoon. And to begin, Lee Eun's solo exhibition As You Wished Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo will be held.

Lee Eun (b.1995) is an artist interested in short-form content that symbolizes the transition from character-based communication to a digital native era and converts moving GIFs into painting media. It mainly focuses on hand-drawn-based 2D animations televised in the 2000s, starting with a nostalgia for the familiar popular culture that the artist, born at the end of the century, watched and grew up with as a child. The GIFs referenced by Lee Eun as the subject matter form a new meaning and context by reconstructing short and dramatic moments away from the original narrative, and Lee Eun's work of interpreting the GIFs into cinematic grammar such as editing, emphasizing, and omitting resembles the fragmentation of contemporary visual culture.

Lee Eun transforms the expression of traditional painting in various ways. The images of Tom & Jerry, Cinderella, and Donald Duck mixed with abstract expressionist elements, creating a familiar yet unfamiliar scene. It is related to Lee Eun's unique way of working with GIFs; unlike artists who depict static objects, Lee Eun works with dynamic GIFs in play. The transition from a video with temporality to a painting with persistence is translated by the viewers into a movement reminiscent of the original, stimulating infinite imagination. Various tools, such as wet paints, dry materials, sprays, and oil bars, create layers beyond flatness in translating the work. The crushed and splashed paint marks, the overlapped layers, and the trajectory of the spreading movement are captured as moments of the flowing image in a doodle-like form, giving it a sense of remaining on the canvas.

In this exhibition, Lee Eun presents a large wall drawing that expands the canvas screen to the wall of the exhibition space. Following an attempt to organize the exhibit wall like a pop-up window on a GIF site in the previous exhibition, this exhibition removes the canvas frame to expand the expressive act to the large wall of the exhibition hall. During the last exhibition, Lee Eun's work was based on short GIFs of less than five seconds. However, for the exhibition halls of Sungkok Art Museum, which are 6 meters high and 16 meters wide, the artist attempts to work based on a video with more extended breath, lasting two to three minutes. It is also in line with the trend that content is created as giant platforms like YouTube or Netflix absorb the media environment in which we use individual sites to consume content. This wall drawing, which records traces of marks and actions that occurred during painting, is a digital drawing that transforms the classical working methods of Impressionist artists who captured the changing colors of nature on the canvas in a contemporary way.

The process of work that the author calls "making friends" is a new story written by actively intervening in the world of the original world, and naughty characters are like our childhood friends brought up in memory. GIFs depict the life of modern people stuck in a rut, and the characters of Lee Eun, who are free from GIFs, metaphorize individual human beings who dream of a free and creative life. The exhibition title, Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo is a word taken from a magical spell memorized by the fairy godmother of the animation Cinderella and contains Lee Eun's desire to become a creator who does magical things.

- Sungkok Art Museum