Lee Jinju (b. 1980) meticulously depicts strange and uncanny scenes, objects, and landscapes encountered in daily life, applying the coloring techniques of Eastern painting that use water as a medium. She paints subjective landscapes where experiences, memories, and imaginations—captured through her continuous process of inner exploration—are perceived simultaneously. 

Her paintings unfold landscapes where memory and the unconscious, truth and fiction, and dissolved time coexist. While they evoke a sense of entering an unreal, imaginary world, they also contain deeply personal and subjective realities rooted in everyday life.

In Lee Jinju’s paintings, seemingly unrelated everyday objects—such as plants resembling those seen in a yard, garden hoses, fallen pigeons, and crumpled pieces of paper—appear together in a single scene, along with nude figures in various poses, creating a dreamlike atmosphere. Individually, they are familiar objects and everyday scenes, but her paintings evoke a strange and uncanny feeling. This is because the artist arranges fragmented memories across the canvas.

Lee began capturing how memories emerge as images, how they manifest within certain senses, and in what ways they appear—using drawing as a medium. She explains that, through this process, scenes witnessed in daily life and familiar landscapes become intertwined with images that intrude independently of her intentions, resulting in a layered, dreamlike record.

The artist also states that when we remember something, the circumstances and emotions of that moment become entangled, shaping what is "remembered." As a result, her paintings—composed of fragments of memory—are imbued with psychological afterimages.

For instance, An Island of Incomplete Memories (2011), which evokes a dark and melancholic atmosphere, reflects the trauma from her childhood buried deep within her memory.

This work is based on the artist’s recollection of being kidnapped at the age of four. While she was in college, a series of crimes occurred near her, suddenly resurfacing the long-forgotten, haunting memory. Memories she wished to erase but could never fully forget began to resurface and intertwine. In response, she confronted these unsettling truths from her past and translated them into painting.

The tangled objects in her paintings serve as traces of her effort to bring forth her inner wounds. The fragments of memory—unwanted yet impossible to erase—manifest in her work through these objects.

Lee Jinju’s early works stem from experiences where childhood memories are triggered by her surroundings or objects. As she visually unraveled the unspoken stories within her, she one day came to realize that the things she encounters in daily life are intertwined with life and death. 

In 2014, her father fell ill and passed away the following year. At the same time, as she watched her children grow day by day, she came to understand that life and death, creation and disappearance, are deeply interconnected. Alongside this realization, she reflected on how tragic events—such as the Sewol Ferry disaster—continue to occur across the world, inevitably seeping into our lives. Yet, despite these tragedies, humanity persists, struggling forward.

The Lowland (2017) encapsulates the intertwined realities of life and death, merging the artist’s personal experiences with broader social events. To ensure that these images resonate with space, Lee Jinju transforms the shape of her canvases. 

Her ‘shaped canvas’ utilize the wall as a form of negative space, creating an area rich with unspoken or ineffable narratives. This void, rather than being empty, holds countless possibilities and meanings, acting as a space for stories that remain untold.

Deceptive Well (2017), created in the same year, is another ‘shaped canvas’ work that reflects the artist’s thoughts on existence. In this piece, Lee Jinju connects three parallel layers, placing multiple memories within a single temporal frame. 

Rendered in an overall monochromatic palette, the work exudes a dark and melancholic atmosphere. As the viewer’s gaze moves from the top to the bottom, the composition takes on the structure of peering into the deep abyss of the mind, where painful wounds and memories reside.

Starting in 2017, Lee Jinju’s ‘Black Painting’ series fully emerged, featuring deep black voids reminiscent of an abyss. In the early stages of this series, she primarily used traditional black pigments and ink. However, she later developed her own light-absorbing black pigment, layering it multiple times to create a profound sense of depth and infinite possibility within the void. Within this darkness, she illuminates only fragments of the body—faces, hands, or other partial forms—offering a new way to express the inner self. 

Unlike her previous works, where fragmented memories densely populated surreal landscapes in intricate and peculiar arrangements, the ‘Black Painting’ series conceals situations and events within darkness, leaving them unmanifested. Though only parts of the body emerge from the shadows, countless unseen elements remain interconnected beneath the surface, embedded within the obscured depths.

Among these works, hand, wall (2017) embodies the artist’s contemplation of the question, “What is the true landscape that we see?” In the painting, a pair of hands covers a face, revealing only one eye between the fingers—one open, the other closed. This ambiguous gesture can be interpreted as a metaphor for obstruction, preventing a clear view, yet it may also serve as a protective barrier, shielding the viewer from something difficult to face. 

Lee Jinju explains that the image emerged from her thoughts on situations where something is either deliberately concealed or pushed into an unseen realm—circumstances where one struggles to look but cannot entirely turn away. Within the black void of the painting, the act of seeing and its intertwined psychological complexities exist in a state of tension.

Additionally, to depict multilayered and complex psychological landscapes, Lee often constructs various spatial structures within her paintings. She sometimes encloses certain scenes within transparent, cube-like frames or arranges multiple landscapes in parallel, resembling a series of floating islands.

In recent works, her psychological landscapes extend beyond the two-dimensional canvas, manifesting in three-dimensional installation. In her 2020 solo exhibition 《The Unperceived 死角》 at ARARIO MUSEUM in SPACE, she installed canvases three-dimensionally at the viewer’s eye level.

The Unperceived (2020), adopts the format of a traditional Korean scroll painting. Just as a scroll painting unfolds its narrative through shifting viewpoints, the artwork invites viewers to move laterally along its length, revealing the story progressively. The elongated format, which cannot be grasped in a single glance, forces the viewers to acknowledge the limitations of human perception—suggesting that what we see is only a fragment of a much larger reality. 

In the artist’s recent work (im)possible (2024), the piece takes the form of both a painting and a sculpture. The structure consists of canvases attached front and back, as if standing back to back. This three-dimensional, double-sided work simultaneously presents two different scenes on each side. On one side, a person riding on someone’s shoulders holds a white bedspread with a pig's head and a severed tree trunk. On the other side, a person wrapped in the bedspread is lying face down, diligently recording something, with a pruned tree trunk placed on top of them.

The work simultaneously conveys the stories of beings thriving and growing under absurd and harsh conditions, the records left behind in the face of mortal time, and the unwavering strength of standing upright.

In this way, Lee Jinju’s paintings express the artist's subjective narrative or her perspective on the world we stand in, in various forms. She follows the philosophical principle of East Asian painting, which seeks to "depict the spirit through form," while also developing her own materials and method of expression to create the landscapes she wishes to portray.

The landscapes in her paintings, which are sometimes lonely and dark, and at other times seem to have discordant elements, reflect the artist’s view of a world where beauty and ugliness, as well as the inexplicable, coexist. Through her work, Lee confronts the contradictory reality where beauty and revulsion coexist, presenting things that already exist but are not yet recognized, and communicates with the ordinary people living together in this world.

“It depicts a world of psychological subjectivity but also of contradictions at the same time. I’d like to put my reality in this realistic world.” (Lee Jinju, Artist’s Note) 

Lee Jinju graduated from the Department of Eastern Painting at Hongik University and completed a master’s course at its graduate school. She recently held a solo exhibition at the Yuz Flow, Yuz Project Space of Art, the Hong Kong exhibition space of the Yuz Museum in Shanghai. She has also held solo exhibitions at ARARIO MUSEUM in SPACE (Seoul, Korea, 2020), Triumph Gallery (Moscow, Russia, 2019), Edwin's Gallery (Jakarta, Indonesia, 2018), and ARARIO GALLERY Seoul (Seoul, Korea, 2017), among others.

Lee has also participated in group exhibitions at numerous venues including Marres, House of Contemporary Culture (Maastricht, The Netherlands, 2022), White Cube Seoul (Seoul, Korea, 2023), SONGEUN (Seoul, Korea, 2023 and 2022), Korea Cultural Center (Brussels, Belgium, 2021), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (Seoul, Korea, 2021), Museum of Moscow (Moscow, Russia, 2021), Asia Culture Center (Gwangju, Korea, 2019), Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea, 2015), Doosan Gallery New York (New York, US, 2013), Ilmin Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea, 2010).

Lee Jinju received Second Prize of JoongAng Fine Arts Prize in 2009 and Second Prize of SONGEUN Art Award in 2014. Lee's works are in public collections in Korea, in the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul Museum of Art, Gyeongnam Art Museum, ARARIO MUSEUM, SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation, and OCI Museum of Art.

References

• 이진주, Lee Jinju (Artist Website)
• 아라리오갤러리, 이진주 (ARARIO Gallery, Lee Jinju)
• SBS뉴스, [취재파일] 기억과 나…이진주 ＆ 원성원, 두 여자의 기억, 2013.10.29
• 리포에틱, 이진주 인터뷰, 2020.11.17
• 국립현대미술관, 이진주 | 저지대 | 2017 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), Lee Jinju | The Lowland | 2017)
• 아라리오갤러리, 가짜 우물 (ARAIO Gallery, Deceptive Wall)