Cinema, illustration and red flowers : the symbolic scenes of Dura Lee

Dura Lee’s illustrations are colorful and look like movie scenes. Grandiose landscapes, dreamy interiors and characters harnessed to simple stories or, on the contrary, caught up in supernatural contexts, enrich dense storytelling that fits into a single image. In her second graphic novel Memories of Red, to be published in 2021, flowers, whether simple patterns, earrings or fluttering petals in the sky, play a symbolic role. “They represent love and expectation of someone,” the Korean illustrator tells us, without revealing more.

After graduating in oriental painting, Dura Lee worked as a fashion designer. “When I decided to draw again, I wanted to get into designing a graphic novel. That’s how I started illustration.”

With her first graphic novel Youth and Island published in 2020, she shows the influence of fashion but also, cinema, in her artistic practice. Through different grid systems, little stories come to life thanks to a color palette, from turquoise to poppy red. “I always get inspired by films. When I draw, I make my own stories and imagine that it is part of the scene”, she concludes.

For Memories of Red, red becomes the predominant color of Dura Lee’s graphic palette. Thanks to this color, the flowers, whether they are simple patterns embroidered with a tablecloth, long earrings or even petals flying away according to the illustrations, construct the story like a red thread. Symbols of love, disappearance and waiting for the loved one, flowers are ultimately the main characters in Dura Lee’s last graphic novel.