LEE Eunsil: Surging Waves: SOLO EXHIBITION

LEE Eunsil had long harbored the intention of translating the experience of her first childbirth into her artistic practice. As the event constituted an overwhelmingly powerful shock to her life, it also required time—time to maintain a certain distance and to confront the subject with objectivity. Having allowed sufficient years to pass, she now presents the resulting works for the first time at ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL. The recent works featured in this exhibition examine, from multiple perspectives, the psychological, physical, and social transformations experienced by an individual through the symbolic event of giving birth. The works seek to sensitively capture the fluctuations of emotion—their rises and falls—that an imperfect human existence undergoes when faced with the immense event of life’s emergence. Under the exhibition title, which likens the major and minor turning points encountered in life to the heights of waves, 10 new paintings, executed in traditional Korean painting techniques, are presented across the ground floor and basement level of the gallery.

The colors of the images reflecting on giving birth are radiant. Each scene evokes sublime yet threatening natural phenomena, such as erupting volcanoes, waves surging through a typhoon, or dense, enveloping fog. The birth of a fetus simultaneously signifies the fragmentation of the body that conceived it—both in the physical process by which another life emerges from within a single body and ultimately separates from it, and in the psychological transformation through which parts of the self are redistributed toward caregiving. Giving birth is an act that embodies both generation and rupture: the dissolution of the subject and the expansion of existence. It is at once an instinctive and natural process, and an event that marks a major turning point in an individual’s life—at times shaped by social norms. LEE visualizes the complex emotions embedded in this process—pain and joy, despair and liberation—through the language of painting. By layering sensations and emotions, visions and memories drawn from her most intimate inner world onto expansive and universal natural landscapes, the focus shifts from “woman” as the agent of birth to “life” itself, and further toward “nature,” which bears all forms of life. By translating the fragile suffering of the human body experienced through childbirth into monumental natural landscapes, the works suggest the possibility of cycles and recovery. The artist’s own memories—brought forth into the public sphere only after the passage of a generation—are transformed into a medium that resonates with the physical and psychological traumas of others.

LEE was born in 1983 and received her BFA in Korean Painting from Seoul National University in 2006, followed by an MFA from the same institution in 2014. She has held solo exhibitions at various institutions including ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL (Seoul, Korea, 2025), No.9 Cork Street (London, UK, 2024), P21 (Seoul, Korea, 2021), U-jung Art Space (Seoul, Korea, 2019), Doosan Gallery (New York, US, 2016), Room 1003, Changgang Building (Seoul, Korea, 2013), Project Space Sarubia (Seoul, Korea, 2010), and Alternative Space Pool (Seoul, Korea, 2009). LEE was selected as a participating artist in major exhibitions such as The 29th Joongang Fine Arts Prize (2007), Young Korean Artists 2008 at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (2008), and ARTSPECTRUM 2014 at Leeum Museum of Art (2014). In 2019, she received the Excellence Award at The 19th SONGEUN Art Award, drawing significant attention. Her works are included in the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Korea), the Seoul Museum of Art (Korea), Songeun (Korea), and the ARARIO Collection (Korea).