Heejoon Lee’s Abstract Paintings Create New Encounters with the Urban Environment
Heejoon Lee, installation view of “Scaffolding” at Kumho Museum of Art, 2023. Photo by Euirock Lee. Courtesy of the artist.
This article was produced in partnership with the Korea Arts Management Service (KAMS).
Today, art no longer settles on a single meaning, but instead functions as a way to capture new meanings. In this way, Korean painter Heejoon Lee compares his work to a kind of “platform.” Rather than anchoring in a single idea, his abstract oil and photo collage works place viewers into a pictorial space built through experiments that can mobilize their own experiences, memories, and knowledge. Lee’s works create new meanings through their interactions with the viewer.
From the beginning of his career, Lee has consistently paid attention to the urban environment surrounding him. He walks around the city as a “flaneur” (a term borrowed from Walter Benjamin to describe a keen urban explorer), photographing buildings with his cell phone, which he then integrates into his the way he thinks about painting. By mobilizing the observer’s gaze from a microscopic point of view, as if flowing along the city’s lifeline, Lee discovers new meanings in everyday objects and places. This practice is a way for the artist to understand the complexity and dynamics of the city by exploring time and space.
Heejoon Lee, Space Traveler, 2021. Photo by Euirock Lee. Courtesy of the artist.
Heejoon Lee, detail of If You Cut the Clouds With a Knife, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
The elements of the buildings that Lee reconstructs in his images is interesting, since he selects those that are not particularly monumental. For example, he often focuses on the gap or alleyway between buildings. In recent years, he has painted on top of photos of building interiors, particularly those with the appearance of roughly collapsed and overlapped debris, like in If You Cut Clouds With a Knife (2023). This clearly indicates the focus of his gaze. The artist’s eye for these particulars of buildings, or even the texture of the interior material, erases the context of the specific locations, translating them into something more universal: space.
By exploring the forms, proportions, and colors inherent to space, Lee then abstracts these captured elements into geometric forms and allows them to conflict with his own expressive style, shown through dots, lines, and color fields on canvas, turning his sensory impression of everyday scenery into pictorial tension, as in Space Traveler (2021), for instance.
The photos that Lee uses are informed by the artist’s unique way of seeing the urban environment. In early works, these were used as a reference, but in more recent works, they have become a basis for abstracting the two-dimensional work. Instead of erasing the original context by segmenting and recombining images, he presents depth in his work by painting in bold thick color in interlocking planes, lines, and dots in a geometric, logical style. In this way, his works fragment, enlarge, and rearrange black-and-white photos, thus breaking that smooth surface of these digital images.
Heejoon Lee, installation view of “Image Architect” at Incheon Art Platform, 2021. Photo by Euirock Lee. Courtesy of the artist.
In addition, the traces of pixels in digital photographs and the material sense of their glitches allow the viewer to experience a fresh sense of space, enhanced by Lee’s geometric painting style and his own pictorial gestures created by brushstrokes. His process of abstraction thus seems to make expected objects in the photos disappear, creating a contrast between the physicality of the painting and the non-materiality of the digital image.
Modernist painters tried to add depth and form of actual space on a canvas through color, form, and lighting. In contemporary art, on the other hand, the principles of abstraction, three-dimensionality, and balance expand to the depth and dimension of a space by interacting with the observer’s gaze on canvas. With this in mind, Lee compares the layers in his paintings to “scaffolding,” a term which gave its name to his most recent exhibition at the Kumho Museum of Art in Seoul. Similarly, he names the three-dimensional structures created by dismantling and recombining these scaffoldings “mining.” In his work, Lee disrupts conventional boundaries between inside and outside, inviting viewers to freely explore and add new interpretations to his art.
Lee’s abstract spaces, by thoughtfully engaging with the observer’s perspective, oscillate between different concepts of space and place. Viewers can allow time and narrative to emerge through the lens of individual, subjective interpretation, fulfilling Lee’s hope that his images “can generate stories of others.” In this way, Lee fosters an art experience where viewers can navigate freely and non-linearly, encouraging them to forge personal paths and perspectives as they engage with his work, ultimately creating a rich tapestry of shared stories and experiences.
