So bright there, so dark here.
From A Lunar Eclipse by Na hi-deok

It’s really funny. Rumor has it that It’s really hot! But, here it is quiet. It should be full of boisterousness, but the mountains and the trees stand where they do and water flows where it does. The icons of an ideal landscape painting are scattered about fulfilling their duty quietly. That is all. No deviation, no kicking and screaming kinetics can be found here. No wonder it is quiet. But there, it is said, is full of activities. It is said that “It’s really hot!” So, this is the case, and it is really funny. Could it be that “It’s really hot!” is not really a rampant rumor traveling here and there but simply a false rumor that materialized itself out of nowhere?

Lee Eun-sil does not talk about life directly. what she talks about are things that are marginal to life. At times they are about things that were unspoken because they were forced to keep silent in order to maintain a world full of silence: at other times they are about things that were too noisy and therefore buried to never see the light of day. In other words they are about things that existed only as rumors. Rumors are not uttered directly. This is true even if they are true. They only have wavelengths, so they spread in repetition, from a mouth to a private ear. Lee catches what travel as rampant rumors and gives them utterance, as if to say, ‘so bright there, so dark here.’ Rumors are no longer rumors as soon as they are uttered. It seems as if Lee is talking about what is marginal to life. All the things that we want to hide or cannot speak of but she talks about life more directly than anybody else.

Truth #1 about the rumor: The prohibited space that is most bright
The surface of Lee Eun-sil’s work is dark, but we can say it is bright because of the relationship between traditional landscape (which sometimes becomes a ‘room’) and the unfamiliar characters placed in it. it’s really hot! attracts the attention of the viewer with surface elements of traditional landscape painting. The landscape has everything that it should according to the idealized landscape painting.
The idealized scenery of the traditional landscape painting is a landscape that does not exist in nature. Thus one cannot convey the noisy boisterousness of real life, because, there, only idealized an language can be uttered. That is why it is silent there. No rumors exist there.
But we are told that there are rumors there. The rumors contained in an idealized world cannot come to the surface even if they are true. The only thing one could do is to find any cracks in the idealized world and put the rumors there, as if hiding them. if one follows the point of view in the scenery in it’s really hot! one will see definite lines among smudged scenes. This, and that, portrays two naked human beings. They are hidden behind the landscape and are not obviously visible, and their faces are completely hidden behind the scenery, but they are also faithfully carrying out their work. The landscape, which was quiet and lonely with silence, is now almost too noisy with the activity of the people hidden in it. 
The same kind of structure works in A Room. We see a gentleman, who should be reading a book sitting up straight: instead he has his head turned back, and his buttocks are shown. He is defecating. He is doing it not only in a room, but it continues on a ferryboat and on land in a mountain valley. In fact he visits every mountain and river in the country on a Defecation Tour. The activities of these characters in the landscape are strange. But on second thought, they are strange only because they break away from the idealized language. The world created by an idealized language is silent. It seems as if no rumor could gain any access there. However, rumors are generated endlessly, and the rumors break up idealized language into splinters or segments and generate a buzz. That is how so bright a place ‘there’ is made to look so dark ‘here,’ even when it's really hot. 

Truth #2 about the rumor: The world of voyeurism
However, rumors are after all not uttered loudly. Thus Lee has hidden them under a blanket of silence, the subjects in the painting cannot have faces, and the viewer can only look at them from the corners of their eyes. What Lee suggests is a door (window) as a means to connect subject/audience to artist/work. There is a door in all her works, without exception. The ‘door’ allows, or intercepts, an entry at an ontological level. The artist has left the door open, the subjects in the painting think that the door is closed, that is how they are engaged in activities that are difficult to reveal publicly; through the door the viewers are looking freely, albeit uncomfortably, at what would be difficult to see (things that one might do only behind closed doors.)
In this way Lee is playing a game of gazes with the door in between. The artist is controlling the door. The door is open to outside gazes and closed to gazes from within. In fact the subjects within are oblivious to outside gazes. Their faces are hidden, and they seem preoccupied with their (sexual and other bodily) activities. Their gazes are only focused on themselves. this condition allow those inside the condition to concentrate on their own activities, and to those outside it provides the proper condition to look at the inside freely. Through such composition the artist pulls the outside gazes (the viewers) into the world of voyeurism.
Chunhwa and  illustrations of pornographic novels from the late Joseon period have  compositions that suggest that the painter is looking at the subjects voyeuristically. (In the film Eumran Seosaeng Yunseo, the main character, is looking for more stimulating illustrations for the pornographic novels he writes, and he asks Gwangheon, the illustrator, to watch him have sex with Jeongbin, the king’s favorite mistress in the royal court.) Through the doors. Lee Eun-sil's paintings also maximize such an effect. However, Lee dose not use the forthright language of chunhwa. What is central to the artist is not the forthrightness of the activity but how it interacts with the world around it. Thus her description of the activities is neither realistic nor stimulating. Through the door the artist has closed off the space inside and is exposing that closed space to an outside gaze; however there is a possibility that the door is closed to us and open to the subjects inside, and that is a possibility that could happen anytime. The world of voyeurism suggested by Lee is one that is constructed by mutually dynamic relations between inside and outside.
    
New rumors to be discovered
Rumors may have clear messages; nevertheless they cannot be loudly uttered. Rumors travel through rifts in unstable reality. Thus their messages are transmitted to only those who recognize them. There is always a possibility that we will miss any rampant rumors passing by us. Lee Eun-sil perceives hidden messages in silent reality as rumors and utters them. Loudly. About Why it is said that it is “so bright there,〔but〕so dark here.” She shares the bright spots that she has perceives. But, here the problem is the newsworthiness of the rumor. If they are rumors that are hackneyed and commonplace, they will not be heard no matter how loudly the artist utters them. Let us look forward to the rumors she will find in gaps in reality. 

Daebum Lee, Art Critic