Jonghwan Lee

At the fertile crossroads of painting and perception, Jonghwan Lee transforms materials—watercolour, engraving, graphite, plaster, and aluminium—into immersive landscapes and textures. His works arise from a cyclical process of hypothesis, creation, observation, and reconfiguration, with each canvas contributing to a broader, interconnected dialogue. Operating at the edge of flatness, Lee’s surfaces ripple with low relief and subtle material shifts, collapsing the divide between two‑dimensional image and sculptural form. His technique often involves chemical casting reactions—such as gypsum interacting with water and powder—to produce emergent forms that resonate with organic unpredictability. Rather than depict narrative scenes, his compositions enact perception itself. Visual motifs—eyes, plant-like textures, geological forms—act as conduits for embodied observation, provoking the viewer to sense vitality lurking beneath the material. In doing so, his paintings resist representational certainty and instead invite sustained visual experience, where meaning is mutable and in flux. Through a disciplined yet intuitive layering process, Jonghwan Lee’s practice reveals painting as a medium of both inquiry and sensation: a space where image, material, and consciousness intersect, and where perception becomes the subject itself. ...