Sang Nam Lee at Elga Wimmer PCC - New York

For the past 30 years, 22 of them while a resident in New York, Korean-born painter Sang Nam Lee has exhibited internationally to respectful, if sometimes mystified, critical notice. The reasons are not far to seek. His surfaces--usually layer upon resanded layer of acrylic--are exquisite, while his forms are severe, cryptic, impersonally abstract and almost maddeningly suggestive.

In the past, Lee's images have centered, literally and figuratively, on circles--even circles within circles--with all their implications of timelessness and universality intact. Missing, however, is any easy key to an explicit meaning code. The forms, punctuated by slightly curved vectors, hover on their monochrome fields like signs from a still-elusive language. Viewing them can induce a spiritualized version of cross-cultural disorientation.

The group of seven works shown recently in Chelsea mark a subtle but consequential shift. Circles and ellipses, much smaller now in relative scale, congregate into patterns, often conjoined with stacks of overlapping linear triangles that evoke hightech machine diagrams or, more whimsically, Space Invader aliens. Lee's insistently flat pictorial fields are for the first time riddled with nervous energy. Though the lines remain as steady and the compositional process as laborious and meditative as ever, this interplay of clustering and vacancy creates a skittish vitality.

All produced since 1999, these paintings eschew grand compositional hierarchies, letting their black-on-white, circle-and-line figures find a charged equilibrium with the void. The vaguely futuristic look of Lee's schematics, like the liveliness of their distribution, bespeaks a stubborn affirmation. With a rare burst of Q-and-A candor, Lee told Jonathan Goodman in last fall's Art Asia Pacific that "the straight line is death, the circle life." If, as he claims, his work strives to embrace both and attain "awakening, or release into eternity," this was nevertheless a show where vital human inventiveness seemed to prevail.

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