Gallery Hyundai presents Jin Han Lee’s solo exhibition “Lucid Dreams” through December 22. “Lucid Dreams” marks Lee’s first solo exhibition at Gallery Hyundai, providing a comprehensive overview of her fifteen-year-long practice in London and her work since returning to Korea where she currently works.

Lee’s lively paintings cut across the abstract and figurative to channel sensations that are hard to verbalize, such as the estrangement from differences in language while living abroad or the emotions surrounding parting with a lover. Recurring motifs such as feet, the sun and moon, and love variate and expand as fluidly as Lee’s pushing and pulling brushstrokes that challenge spatial boundaries of traditional painting.

Her early works created during her time in the UK reconceptualize communication barriers as an aperture for examining the workings of metaphorical language, putting forward central motifs inspired by specific episodes in daily life. As these motifs accumulated with time, Lee started to variegate and weave various motifs into her own narratives, which thematically started approaching universal human experiences and emotions.

Furthermore, experimentation with VR (virtual reality) during an artist residency in 2021 kindled the artist’s reflection on the essential language of painting, leading to innovative new works that demonstrate brushstrokes that not only “push” in alignment with traditional painting but also “pull,” echoing traditions of East Asian calligraphy.

Across her creative evolution, Lee Jin Han continues to highlight open conduits between inner lives and universality which operate beyond structured language.

“Lucid Dreams”
2024.11.06 - 2024.12.22
Tue-Sun 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
Gallery Hyundai
14 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea

Ji Yeon Lee has been working as an editor for the media art and culture channel AliceOn since 2021 and worked as an exhibition coordinator at samuso (now Space for Contemporary Art) from 2021 to 2023.