Oil on Canvas
200 x 200 cm


Oil on Canvas
200 x 200 cm


Oil on Canvas
200 x 200 cm


The series Between Red is at first glance overwhelmingly simple. A series of landscape paintings is rendered in delicate washes of red. Large swaths of unmarked white meander between islands of crimson land. The blank spaces are harshly set against the carefully detailed fragments in red; nonetheless, they cohere into the flawless totality that is created by each painting.

The fragmentation behind the landscape’s seeming totality is operating at the core of Sea Hyun Lee’s paintings. It is due to that fragmentation that these seemingly simple landscapes are able to evoke multiple dualities, a vast landslide of inconsistencies and fissures. This fundamental gesture of splitting, alongside its contrasting totality, is the uncanny tension that animates Lee’s paintings, and that makes them compelling both on a conceptual and a purely aesthetic level.

Despite their distinctly political engagement - the paintings combine elements of both the North and South Korean mountains, and employ the deeply symbolic color of red - Lee’s paintings are unlikely to strike the viewer as either political statements or aesthetic calculations. And indeed, they are neither and not even simply both. They are primarily deeply personal works that reference Lee’s own sense of the past and its losses. Here, Lee tarries with two familiar ideas: nostalgia and utopia. But he avoids approaching either with mere simplicity or mere skepticism. Instead, his paintings are infused with a sophisticated sense of nostalgia, and a wry idea of utopia.

Quoted from UNION (www.union-gallery.com)