Lee Jinju’s Paintings of Women in Disarray Evoke Interior Worlds

This article was produced in partnership with the Korea Arts Management Service (KAMS).

Lee Jinju’s paintings brim with allegory. Referred to by the artist as “both psychological self-portraits and landscapes,” her paintings not only peer into her memories and internal world, but also prompt us to ponder human existence.

Lee had her first solo show in 2006, and over the last 17 years she has created narrative works that teeter on the edge of dissolution. For example, in The Lowland (2017), the artist depicts multiple women in nothing but pantyhose, apparently carrying wreaths of flowers (either ceremonial or for mourning) from right to left. Scattered across the scene are pieces of fruit peel, clothing, paper cups, loose food scraps in a frying pan, and even bags of waste: in other words, objects devoid of vitality.

Unfolding like a hefty scroll at five and a half meters across, the work hangs at some distance from the wall rather than directly upon it, giving it a three-dimensional feeling. In this dystopian landscape, everything is precarious. The women appear to be climbing a temporary pathway, cobbled together out of a flimsy array of branches. The painting suggests that these identically clad figures are the same person, in different moments in time, giving the scene a sense of temporality. Lee takes fragmented recollections and delineates them through brushstrokes that are intricate enough to capture every last detail, down to a single strand of hair.

Lee’s use of traditional Korean coloration techniques and materials shows the influence of the Eastern theory of portraiture entitled jeonsinsajo, which strives to encapsulate both the form and the spirit of its subject. To capture these spirits, the artist draws on a diverse spectrum of surrogate objects in order to portray the world around her, along with her own perspective and emotions. In one of Lee’s earlier works, Mourn for a Dress (2008), an exquisitely crafted dress, stripped of its purpose as a garment, simply crumples into a heap of floral fabric. Perhaps, the work suggests, this object is indeed a thing that deserves to be mourned, having failed to carry out its function as a commodity made to clothe a human body, whether that’s keeping that body warm and protected, or to provide aesthetic decoration.

In keeping with Lee’s description of her own work as “a tale of the interior self that begins in the real world,” most of the objects that crop up in her paintings consist of everyday items. What is important about these objects, in Lee’s work, is not their form, but rather in their state: what’s happening to the object, rather than its inherent qualities. In this sense, objects in Lee’s paintings often function as a metaphor for the artist’s interiority.

For the first decade of Lee’s career, loss and grief, combined with an enduring will to live, seemed to be the driving force in her painting. This is one of the reasons why the works made during this time were so arresting to the eye. Her frequent subject was a woman within a place of breakdown, confined to a house, in her underwear eating, sleeping, and weeping, as objects scattered all around her are in disarray—from dolls and scissors, to hair, laundry, branches, and skeins of thread.

A noticeable shift occurred in Lee’s work in the mid-2010s, when the artist began to introduce balance into her pieces. Her landscapes continue to derive meaning from their repetition of specific surrogate objects, but these objects are now shown in physical equilibrium, poised in stability.

At the same time, Lee builds on traditional Eastern-style painting techniques by boldly omitting extraneous components, while portraying the particulars of her subject in extreme detail, narrowly focusing the viewer’s attention. This focus is particularly noticeable in Lee’s black painting series (2016–present), which uses a unique pigment: Handmade Leejeongbae Black. Named after its creator, Lee’s husband and fellow artist Lee Jeong Bae, this shade boasts high levels of saturation and purity which yields a velvety texture.

Lee Jinju’s work employs this color to produce a metaphor for oblivion in her obscure abstraction, contrasting with the tenacious and animated detail of the artist’s subjects: hands clutching fire, dough, eggs, soil, or hands shrouding faces. These black paintings—as shown in recent exhibitions such as “Panorama” at SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation and “The Embodied Spirit” at White Cube Seoul (2023)—consist only of disembodied subject matter. These paintings remind the viewer yet again of the nature of memories: the way they lie in wait before abruptly coming to mind with excruciating clarity.

In recent work, Lee has also begun to focus more deeply on the medium of painting—in other words, the conditions of a two-dimensional surface. Early in her career, Lee routinely used canvases to create three-dimensional spaces. In her solo exhibition “The Unperceived” (2020) at Arario Gallery in Seoul, these efforts turned into full-fledged experimentation with three-dimensional installations, where the inexplicable or traumatic events that she’s portrayed seem to break out of the flat surface of the painting and confront the viewer in the gallery space itself.