Heejoon Lee, 'On Board a Ship,' 2022, Acrylic and photo-collage on canvas, 160 x 160 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Kukje Gallery.
Kukje Gallery in Busan is currently presenting Heejoon Lee’s first solo exhibition, which will continue until August 14, 2022. A total of twenty artworks are on display in this exhibition, including A Shape of Taste (2018–), a color field painting series; Image Architect (2021–), a photo collage series; and four sculptural works that are an extension of his paintings.
Heejoon Lee edits images collected from the surrounding environment and transforms them into an abstract space combining painting and photography. The artist observes small changes in the surrounding environment that are often seen in daily life, such as roofs, stairs, and newly painted buildings, collecting the images while looking at the various colors and geometric shapes that make up the surroundings from a new perspective. As an artist who is interested in architecture, Lee transfers abstract painting to the form of a photo collage by applying thick colors to black-and-white photos. Through this process, the urban landscapes that exist in the artist’s memory are able to have elements of space and time, creating a scene where architectural and pictorial elements coexist.
Heejoon Lee (b. 1988) has held a number of solo exhibitions in Korea, including Incheon Art Platform (2021), Weekend (2017), and Kigoja (Independent Arts Space Initiative, 2016). Lee has participated in group exhibitions at distinguished institutions within Korea and abroad, including Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2021), Nam-Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), Seoul (2019), Museum SAN, Wonju (2019), Sehwa Museum of Art, Seoul (2019), Artspace Hue, Paju (2019), Akureyri Art Museum, Iceland (2017), and Glasgow School of Art Showcase (2017). In 2019, he received the First Prize of the “New Hero” award, hosted by the monthly art magazine Public Art. His works are in public collections at the Seoul Museum of Art and MMCA Art Bank at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. He is currently an artist-in-residence at Seoul Art Space Geumcheon.
