LEE Jihyun, Fantasma: Restless Silence: SOLO EXHIBITION

1 July - 15 August 2026 Seoul

Overview

Imagine the artist's first encounter with a blank canvas—that charged emptiness before a single mark has been made. It is the moment one confronts a provisional void, a suspended silence that refuses to settle. Perhaps painting begins with the desire to grasp an uncertain world by translating fragments of experience into tangible material and visible form. For many years, LEE Jihyun's paintings have functioned as a medium that connects the artist's intimate memories with the public discourse of the external world. Images drawn from deeply personal narratives accumulate across the pictorial surface, forming hybrid constellations. Each motif alludes to dreamscapes or ambiguous states of memory. While retaining elements of realistic depiction, these forms are displaced within surreal structures, distancing themselves from the familiarity of ordinary life.

LEE's conceptual subjects—dream imagery, private memories, and mythological elements—take pictorial form through their encounter with the material properties of painting: the physical qualities of its medium and the formal conditions of its support, such as the dimensions of the canvas. In the course of painting, images are first filtered through the artist's consciousness and then reconstructed through the bodily act of representation. The pictorial surface becomes a material field where past, present, and future continually converge. In this way, the singular space of painting transforms an initial conceptual narrative into an affective experience. In other words, before individual elements or narrative details can be articulated in language, painting as a material field is always experienced in the immediate moment of bodily encounter.

In Fantasma: Restless Silence, LEE projects different layers of consciousness onto the exhibition's three-story architectural structure, transforming the exhibition into a book unfolding through three distinct chapters. Recent works, including the Spinola Hours series (2020–2025), were largely inspired by her encounter with the Spinola Book of Hours (c. 1510–1520), an illuminated Flemish manuscript produced in the early sixteenth century. A book of hours is a devotional manuscript containing prayers, psalms, a calendar, and richly illuminated miniatures intended for prayer at designated hours of the day. The Spinola Book of Hours, once owned by the Spinola family of Genoa, is distinguished by its treatment of each page as an independent spatial composition, its fantastical borders, architectural structures, and multilayered organization. LEE recalls feeling of experiencing an inexplicable sense of familiarity upon encountering this relic from a distant culture and era—a consolation, perhaps, born from projecting the anxiety and solitude she experienced as a foreigner in the United States onto the universal history of human devotional practice.

LEE's paintings traverse the strata of consciousness and the unconscious, dreams and reality, language and the nonverbal. Throughout this process, the temporal and spatial dimensions embedded in the event of painting dissolve into pigment and accumulate in successive layers. Memories and records—fragments of myth and history reiterated upon the pictorial surface—are entirely rearranged according to the artist's subjective order. The resulting image generates an immediate affective response in every encounter. As it is sensed bodily and apprehended consciously, it transforms the emotional state of those who stand before it. As an illusion that is experienced through the body, painting ultimately becomes an anchor cast into the world in the hope of fostering a nonverbal resonance between unfamiliar beings. Filled with countless fantasies, LEE's paintings appeal to the most intimate—and therefore the most universal—voids within the human mind.

– Excerpt from "Painting as Material Space-Time and the Strata of Consciousness" | PARK Miran (Deputy Director, Arario Gallery)

Installation Views