Tokyo Gallery, Ginza

Closes September 20

I should have known it from the title. At the opening of the current exhibition at the Tokyo Gallery in Ginza, "The Closed Garden," I asked the South Korean painter Lee Yeunmi whether the stylized motifs in her works were inspired by Korean mythology. Through a translator, she replied "no," and that the first thing to understand about her as an artist is that she was a practicing Christian.

Immediately, everything fell into place: the snake, the trees, the garden — it should have been obvious. South Korea, after all, is nearly 30 percent Christian.

What, then, were the masklike faces, bleeding from their eyes? The 26-year-old Lee explained that the idea for them came to her from a story about a woman who became so addicted to plastic surgery that when she could no longer afford operations, she started to inject herself in the face with collagen, oil or whatever she could find. Ultimately her face began to sag down like a loose bag. Urban myth or not, it's an unpleasant image.

Lee's paintings contain an equal amount of disturbing and pleasant images. Done in hazy pastel blues, greens and pinks, their tranquil softness hides a sharp edge of menace, much like the state of play in the Christian Garden of Eden. A snake coiled like a heart wraps itself around idyllic fields of green populated by bushy trees in "The Closed Garden in The Blue Blood," while another slithers through lush reeds and cool water in "Under the Frogman." Complementing the reoccurring fleshy faces, in the centerpiece of the exhibition, "Blood Stained Stepping Stones," a strange birdlike creature with a bloody beak owns the middle ground of a triptych of paintings done in acrylic and pencil.

The animal's razor-sharp beak could easily suggest surgical scissors. A survey by the Chosun Iibo, one of the country's largest newspapers, found that "eight out of 10 Korean women over the age of 18 feel they need cosmetic surgery, and one out of two has undergone cosmetic surgery at least once."

What could be further from the state of grace posited in the Garden of Eden than the modern practice of plastic surgery? The sin pride, or vanity, was thought by the Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas to be the beginning and the worst of all other sins, as it was "turning away from God, to Whose commandment man refuses to be subject."

In the introduction to the exhibition distributed by Tokyo Gallery (www.tokyo-gallery.com), Lee says that her works are "fairy tales in pursuit of the bizarre," while the gallery reports that the attractive young artist "spends most of her time in a daydream." Lee said that such a moment of distraction during a church service led to the diptych "The Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge" and "The Tree of Life," when the bouquets on either side of the preacher took on the appearance of those old symbols. But daydream or fairy tale, there is real intent behind some of these works, a social commentary that is all the more powerful for avoiding becoming a full-on nightmare.

A recent graduate of Kookmin University's Master of Fine Arts program, Lee has yet to choose a gallery to represent her in South Korea, where the art world functions more like the freewheeling Chinese scene in which artists sell to collectors direct or even put their own works on auction. If one does snatch her up, though, they'll have a fine painter whose works can straddle the line between being pleasing decorative and disturbingly meaningful. (Donald Eubank)