Myoung Ae Lee

Fascinated by the complexity of our world – its overlapping and fluctuating systems, concepts, and ideologies – the Korean artist Myoung-Ae Lee explores the connections, both visible and invisible, that bind us.

Blurring the line between painting, sculpture, collage, and relief, Lee investigates ideas of dimensionality and flatness, relativity and perspective, the abstract and the figurative. “A planet in the vast expanse of space may appear, to us, as a mere dot - yet within that dot lies another world, constantly moving and evolving. In the same way, the society that surrounds me is structured similarly, and my inner world is a reflection of this dynamic structure.”

From her studio in Daejeon, Korea, Lee produces work of great breadth and variety. In her hands, a canvas might host a geometric scene painted in bright colors and applied in flat swathes, or its surface might be animated by a patchwork of cloth and textiles, plaster and paint - a writhing complex of tone and texture.

Having completed a PhD in Fine Art, Lee’s thesis, “The Reinterpretation of Space Through Shaped Canvas,” continues to influence her practice, resulting in a series of works that reimagine the traditional, four-cornered canvas as a free-form shape. Building the ‘canvas’ in multiple layers and materials, Lee carves it into its final form, the shape of which informs her painterly gestures - the colors, textures, and patterns that she creates in response to its contours.

With deep, sloping sides that are an inch-or-so thick, the painted surface sits proud of the wall, becoming an object in its own right: an autonomous being with its own shadow – a complete work.

Born in Seoul, Korea, in 1956, Lee achieved a PhD in Fine Art from the Department of Plastic Arts at the Graduate School of Won-kwang University in 2016. Exhibiting since the early 1980s, Lee’s work has been included in numerous international group shows, with solo presentations at the Seoul Arts Center; Galerie Forum, Berlin; Insa Art Center, Seoul; and Matter Gallery, New York.