Wilfred Lee

Written by Niki Stad

How amazing it was to get to know Wilfred Lee! A great artist who was born and raised here in Toronto! For the last 3 and half years he has been in Korea to broaden his horizon and experience some new things.

When I asked him how he discovered his love for drawing and how he became an artist, he explained “I think everyone always draws at an early age but for artists they keep doing it and they never stop, for me it was an interesting way of self expression.”

He studied animation at York University and said, “Animation taught me a lot, for an artist the best way to study is to observe everything, like nature, you have to read books, watch a lot of movies, you have to kind of understand how people behave, and see how they look at stuff, it helps a lot.” Animation is a combination of all of these factors and that’s how it helped him to grow as an artist.

I noticed him by his amazing caricatures; they looked very funny with a great technic of using pencil and colors. So as my curiousity grew, I looked at his portfolio more carefully. I suddenly thought, WOW! He has such a varaiety of works and a lot of activities which include many art shows, classes, photography, scultpure, music, creating kids stories and so much more. It doesn’t seem like even one minute of his life is going to waste or for even a rest. His life is all about searching and looking for something to inspire him for the next project. It is also inspiring to see an artist like him, full of passion and energy.

Being in Korea has brought a lot of opportunity for Wilfred, he has been busy opening a kindergarten group called “YaYa” (means: kids). It took him about a year of preparation and recently it has been officially opened. His responsibility there is to teach art to the children, who are 2 years old and up. He is also responsible for making all of the text books. He is doing a really huge project there and it’s going to keep growing and become bigger and bigger!

Aside from all of his projects, he has many more jobs in Korea, like working on music! He's been working with a friend who is producer and together they've been creating some awesome tracks, it sounds something like house music. He also works on script writing for stories and movies and has people translate them to Korean.

At 26 years old, Wilfred is handling twice as much as his age experience by now! However, he is now more focused on art these days rather than jumping from branch to branch, he says “ my problem is, I want to do everything, just because I love everything and I can’t focus it all at the same time so I just work on one thing first, and the next season I work on music, then writing and so on”. On weekends he is drawing his caricatures anywhere that things happen…he works with a company called “Fun Caricature” and they have many locations in different parks and hotspots similar to our own wonderland here.

Wilfred is going to have his first solo exhibition from the 26th-31st of December 2010. He seems to be really exited but really busy at the same time! We wish him all the best with his show and career and he is definitly another Torontonian that we all can be proud of!