ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL presents LEE Jihyun’s solo exhibition《Fantasma: Restless Silence》from July 1 to August 15, 2026.
 
Marking the artist’s first solo exhibition in Korea in four years, the exhibition unfolds across the gallery’s first, third, and fourth floors. Through the materiality of painting and the architectural structure of the exhibition space, it brings together LEE’s sustained exploration of memory, time, and the layered workings of consciousness.
 
LEE reconstructs images drawn from remembered places, everyday scenes, mythology, and history through the language of painting. In her work, memory is not a resource for restoring the past as it once existed. Rather, it is an active process through which reality and dream, individual experience and collective narrative overlap, producing new scenes, sensations, and temporal relationships. The artist understands this process as both an inscription of memory and a painterly act of resistance against forgetting.
 
The exhibition title, “Fantasma,” evokes an imaginary manuscript in which memory and imagination, belief and experience are intertwined. The empty spaces within and around the paintings likewise function not as simple blanks, but as “restless spaces”—sites in which emotions and memories persist and new relationships emerge between images, as well as between past and present.
 
 
 
Painting as an Architecture of Memory
 
An important point of departure for the exhibition is the『Spinola Book of Hours』, an illuminated manuscript produced in Flanders in the early sixteenth century. Containing prayers, psalms, calendars, and miniature paintings, the devotional manuscript is distinguished by its elaborate borders, architectural frames, and multilayered pictorial spaces, each constructed independently across its pages.

LEE has described experiencing an inexplicable sense of intimacy with the manuscript, despite its origins in a historical period and cultural context far removed from her own. It became a means of connecting the anxiety and solitude she experienced while living in the United States with broader human practices of faith, consolation, and spiritual reflection.
 
The manuscript’s arched frames and page structures—in which one spatial field appears to open into another—later developed into the geometric frameworks and translucent, membrane-like forms that recur throughout her paintings. Rather than directly reproducing the imagery of the manuscript, LEE translates its underlying compositional principle—the coexistence of multiple temporalities and spatial layers within a single field—into her own painterly language.
 
 
 
A Structure of Consciousness Unfolding Across Three Floors
 
The exhibition organizes the three floors of ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL as though they were sections of an expansive book. Each floor operates as an independent chapter, while the viewer’s movement through the building gradually reveals distinct layers of the artist’s memory and consciousness.
 
On the first floor, defined by its high ceiling, LEE’s personal memories and experiences are superimposed upon the broader temporal fields of mythology and history.
 
Works including the ‘Spinola Hours’ series begin with the medieval manuscript but extend beyond direct historical reference. They construct painterly spaces in which individual experience and historical time, past and present, coexist and intersect.

The third floor turns toward more private memories and intimate scenes drawn from everyday life.
 
Geometric structures reminiscent of folded pop-up books, ornamental borders, human figures, gardens, and indistinct landscapes are densely interwoven. Rather than forming a complete or linear narrative, these images collide, overlap, and pass through one another, revealing the unstable process through which memory is reorganized within consciousness.

The fourth floor centers on works executed in a drawing-like manner on unprimed canvas.
 
Pigment is absorbed directly into the untreated surface, while lines, brushstrokes, and material traces remain visible without being fully corrected or concealed. Here, painting presents not so much a completed image as the artist’s bodily movement, the duration of the working process, and the moment at which an image begins to emerge.

The Spatiotemporality of Memory Generated through Painting
 
For LEE, painting is not merely a flat surface that contains images. It is a material and temporal field in which bodily action and the duration of making accumulate. The thickness of pigment, the movement of the brush, and traces that have been layered, obscured, or erased allow experiences from different moments to coexist within a single work. Through this process, scenes from the past are continuously reorganized through present perception.
 
《Fantasma: Restless Silence》brings this approach into focus. Here, “silence” does not refer to an empty, static, or inactive condition. It signifies a latent space inhabited by what has disappeared, what remains unresolved, and what has yet to emerge. Reality and dream, personal experience and collective narrative intersect without stable boundaries, generating scenes that remain provisional, shifting, and open to further transformation.
 
The exhibition therefore presents LEE’s painting not as a means of reproducing the past, but as a medium through which time, sensation, and memory are materially restructured. Her paintings do not restore forgotten scenes in their original form. Instead, they reveal how residual traces of the past encounter present perception to produce new emotions, images, and spatiotemporal relationships. It is in this continuous reconstruction of memory that the significance of the exhibition lies.

About the Artist
 
LEE Jihyun was born in Seoul in 1979. She studied Western painting at Sungshin Women’s University and its graduate school and received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York.
 
She has held solo exhibitions at ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL in 2008, 2022, and 2026, as well as at Illy Contemporary Art Center, DOOSAN Gallery Seoul and New York, Gallery Sun Contemporary, and ARARIO GALLERY Beijing. She has also participated in group exhibitions at institutions and galleries including The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, NXTHVN, ARARIO GALLERY Seoul and Cheonan, DOOSAN Gallery, and the Seoul Museum of Art.
 
Her works are held in collections including the Government Art Bank and Art Bank of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, and the ARARIO Collection. She currently lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.

ARARIO GALLERY
 
ARARIO GALLERY is a contemporary art gallery based in Korea and China that has introduced both Korean and international artists. Its program encompasses artists from a broad range of generations, from emerging practitioners to internationally active mid-career and senior figures, and includes exhibitions across painting, sculpture, installation, and moving image.
 
ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL actively utilizes exhibition spaces with different ceiling heights and architectural characteristics, presenting exhibitions in which artistic practice is closely connected to the surrounding environment. For this exhibition, LEE organizes the gallery’s three above-ground floors into a book-like spatial narrative, unfolding different layers of memory and consciousness throughout the building.
 

 
Exhibition Information
 
Exhibition: LEE Jihyun《Fantasma: Restless Silence》
Dates: July 1–August 15, 2026
Venue: ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL, 1st, 3rd, and 4th Floors

References

• 아라리오갤러리