Silly Symphony

Lee Eun (b. 1995), who grew up with animations such as Baby Dinosaur Dooly and Sailor Moon, developed her artistic practice through “GIF-fication,” a process of appropriating animated GIFs and translating them into paintings. Stripped of their original narratives, animated characters—often anthropomorphised animals—are reduced to endlessly repetitive, convulsive movements. Their bodies remain suspended between actions, deprived of the narrative continuity that would otherwise carry them forward.

By translating these fragmented childhood images into painting, Lee transforms the smooth surfaces of animation into the material textures of an older medium. This reversal, in which animation becomes the original and painting its copy, challenges the traditional authority of painting while simultaneously revitalising it through contemporary visual culture. Her work evokes nostalgia while exposing the impossibility of recovering the past.

The repetitive gestures of Lee's characters reflect the anxieties and exhaustion of a generation often identified as Gen Z. Their movements suggest a state of paralysis in which progress and the future appear suspended. Yet these seemingly innocent, adorable figures also embody a melancholic awareness of historical catastrophe. Their endless repetition becomes a means of survival rather than advancement, revealing the persistence of bodies that endure without the promise of resolution or liberation.

Lee's paintings thus present a paradox: their characters appear young, harmless, and playful, yet their repetitive gestures convey fatigue, vulnerability, and existential uncertainty. Through these bodies, the artist articulates a generational sensibility shaped by the collapse of utopian expectations. Her expressive brushstrokes suggest both a longing for the past and an inability to move beyond it.

The solo exhibition Silly Symphony centres on a 35-metre-long roll painting based on Flowers and Trees (1932), part of Disney's animated short-film series Silly Symphony (1929–39). Produced using the “Mickey Mousing” technique, which synchronises movement with music, Flowers and Trees was the first commercially released film made in full colour using three-strip Technicolor.

The original animation follows a simple fairy-tale narrative: an old tree, jealous of a younger tree courting a female tree, sets the forest on fire. The fire is extinguished with the help of woodland creatures, and the young couple marries. The story concludes with a predictable happy ending.

Lee transforms this seven-minute-and-fifty-second animation into a continuous 35-metre painting, replacing cinematic editing with an extended pictorial surface. Through this obsessive act of transcription, the artist revisits a familiar childhood experience while exposing the artificiality of animated movement and narrative. The old tree, reduced to a villain, repeatedly appears and disappears, functioning as a device that sustains the happiness of the other characters.

The historical context of Disney's animation is equally significant. During the Great Depression, its synchronised movements and music offered audiences a temporary escape from economic hardship and uncertainty. While critics such as Theodor Adorno questioned the cultural implications of mass entertainment, animation provided comfort to those whose everyday lives were marked by struggle.

For Lee, however, the melancholy of the present suggests that this historical past has never entirely disappeared. The artist describes her attraction to old images through the expression “dusty utopia,” finding beauty and sadness in things that appear faded, obsolete, or burdened by time. This paradoxical sensibility resonates with the title Silly Symphony, whose apparent innocence conceals an awareness of repetition, escapism, and the limitations of progress.

Lee, who describes her practice as “colouring” rather than painting, repeatedly returns to the imagery of childhood through a deliberately regressive process. Her 35-metre installation becomes both a tribute to animation and a portrait of contemporary adulthood, where nostalgia, exhaustion, and the desire for escape coexist.

Ultimately, Silly Symphony reveals how the endlessly repeating images of childhood can embody the melancholy of the present. Through their charming yet unsettled movements, Lee's characters suggest a distinctly 21st-century condition: living amid the ruins of promised futures while continuing, nonetheless, to move.