As the summer ebbed and most SAIC students began preparing for a return to school, a grim message arrived from the Vice President and Dean of Student Affairs, Rob Flot, sharing the news of the passing of MFA Painting and Drawing student Sol Lee.
“We grieve his heartbreaking loss alongside her family, classmates, friends, and everyone she knew,” wrote Flot in an email sent August 15.
Sol’s family was not available for comment by press time. Cause of death and other details of the circumstances of Sol’s passing were not available. Like most artists, her CV and portfolio render an image of her life and what mattered to her.
Sol described her practice in her CV as “transform[ing] symbols into figures of both terror and sublimity, and metaphors for the monstrous skin of society — of unending awkwardness, collective illusions, anxiety, excitement, and discomfort.” Flot said Sol was “…a bold and thoughtful painter whose bracing works featured organic and fantastical shapes, bursting forth from canvases, which were often unstretched and weathered.” Sol explained her intention in working with raw canvas, writing that by leaving “the edges of paintings unstretched and ripped, and using the thin Hangi paper with ink, I also try to show the ephemerality and unstability of the phenomenon in society.”
Sol described her life in the personal statement from her portfolio: “I observe the coexistence of beauty and ugliness, life and death, hope and tragedy simultaneously. The pleasures of nightlife and the disillusionment of day, BTS’s speeches and the deaths of idols, Halloween festivals and the Itaewon tragedy. Beauty and ugliness, life and death, imagination and destruction are close at hand. My work seeks to offer truthful fragments instead of false beauty and hope.”
In addition to attending SAIC, at the time of her death, Sol had a solo exhibit at the Post gallery in Seoul, South Korea.
