Jinhyung Lee

Jinhyung Lee (b. 1982) collects various image sources from visual media and regenerate them into his own painting, capturing their textures and structural silhouettes. Starting from his first solo exhibition in 2020 at Project Space Sarubia, Lee held solo exhibitions including 《pinhole》 (A-LOUNGE, 2021), 《Odonata》 (Incheon Art Platform project space 2, 2022), and 《O》 (The SoSo, 2022). Lee has been selected as Promotion of Young Artists at Project Space Sarubia in 2019, and his artistic residencies include artspace DAL (2021) and Incheon Art Platform (2022), and from 2023 he is now staying at Nanji Residency by Seoul Museum of Art. Also selected for the grant program of Korea Arts Management Service Center, he has been one of the special artists representing Gallery SoSo since 2022.

Lee repeatedly covers the entire surface of the canvas to express the layers. As the paint accumulates, the brush marks and the heavy materiality of the paint gradually fade. A delicate and beautiful canvas is left on the top of the many layers of images that have sunk away, with only fine particles of the paint remaining. While Lee is faithful to every moment of his vision and meticulously transcribes it on canvas, his work moves away from the original form of the object and becomes a single independent image. In this way, his oeuvre – perfect figurative painting transposing objects to the canvas as they are, and abstract painting completed only with pure figurative elements extracted from them – ends up being his unique painting taking a step once again from all of those.