Jae-Hoon Lee’s work captures drawings formed by spontaneous, graffiti-like, and sensory lines, alongside a unique “mural technique” that has become a signature of his practice, creating a distinct sense of place. Since 2007, Lee has utilized mural techniques in his work, producing the distinctive grayscale surfaces often referred to as frescoes. By employing materials such as lime and ink on traditional Korean paper (hanji) to emulate the texture of stone or concrete, and by scratching and layering, he conveys the materiality of plaster walls. Against the backdrop of this rough, scraped surface, Lee’s works have metaphorically expressed critical perspectives on society and institutional structures.
In recent years, he has focused on the abstract qualities of line in Eastern painting, as well as the concept of wayu (臥遊), which refers to placing a landscape painting in a room and experiencing it while lying down. By removing narrative elements, Lee presents abstract formal compositions (intuitive drawings) alongside his mural technique, reinterpreting everyday spaces and exploring new possibilities and methodologies for Korean painting within contemporary art.
Since 2018, Lee has experimented with making his images more tactile and substantial, employing relief techniques that use both bas-relief and low-relief, resulting in works that are perceived as both painting and sculpture. These pieces, which incorporate the textures of murals or reliefs, translate dry fresco techniques into painting, expressing tactile images while visualizing social phenomena and institutional critique through landscapes and still lifes. By doing so, he transforms society from a physical “space” into a “place” defined by values and experience.
The varying intensity of the lines that flow across his canvases, accumulated through the gestures of his body, and the traces scattered and dripped over monochromatic backgrounds, detach the symbolic meaning of the imagery and deepen abstraction. This combination of improvisational action, freedom of movement, and tactile materiality enables viewers to share an abstract experience between artist and audience.
Born in Seoul in 1978, Lee graduated from the Graduate School of Korean Painting at Chung-Ang University. His monochromatic works, navigating the spectrum between black and white, combine the abstraction of line as an element of Eastern painting with the materiality of dry fresco techniques, creating unique abstract paintings that possess the texture and presence of murals or reliefs.
Since his first solo exhibition, <Unmomument> at Kumho Museum of Art in 2008, Lee has participated in over fifty exhibitions and projects. He has received numerous awards, including the Dong-A Art Award (2004), Kumho Young Artist (2007), the Young Korean Artists Selection at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (2008), and the Chongkundang Art Award (2021). His works are held in the collections of Seoul Museum of Art, Busan Museum of Art, MMCA Art Bank, Daewoong Pharmaceutical, Korea Yakult, and JW Pharmaceutical, among others.
