Heejoon Lee (b. 1988) begins his work by walking through the city. As he moves through urban spaces, he attentively observes the balance, proportions, and colors that shape the ordinary landscapes of daily life, drawing inspiration for his paintings. Like a flâneur, he wanders through the city, collecting scenes and extracting abstract images, which he then translates onto canvas.

Heejoon Lee documents the urban landscapes he encounters while wandering through various cities, including Seoul, through photography. He is particularly drawn to architectural structures and street scenes found throughout the city. In his early works, such as the ‘Yellow Scene’ (2010-2012) series, he captured the architectural environment of the city using the language of representational painting. 

Later, in his first solo exhibition, 《Interior nor Exterior: Prototype》, held at Kigoja in 2016, Lee presented works that marked a transition from representational painting to abstract planar compositions.

Since 2015, Heejoon Lee has been developing the ‘Interior nor Exterior: Prototype’ series, which stems from his interest in the aesthetic and formal qualities of architectural environments encountered in daily life. He captures the design sensibility of elements such as marble surfaces or exposed concrete found in buildings. 

His process involves enlarging and editing collected scenes, abstracting external landscapes into vertical and horizontal color planes, and reconstructing them on the canvas. By translating architectural landscapes into a flattened, imaginary space, the ‘Interior nor Exterior: Prototype’ series creates a new spatiality—one that is neither interior nor exterior but is instead defined by structural composition and surface sensation.

Meanwhile, the ‘Emerald Skin’ series, introduced in 2017, captures interior rather than exterior landscapes. This series was inspired by the artist’s experience of seeing emerald-colored shadows of blinds cast on the living room wall after completing renovations on his home.

Instead of merely reproducing blinds as objects, Heejoon Lee sought to depict the surface of the image momentarily imprinted on them and the dynamic variations unfolding upon it.

Blinds are interior elements, yet they serve as intermediaries that both separate and connect the inside and outside. Functioning as a membrane between sunlight from the exterior and objects within, they create shifting surface images that change in response to environmental factors.

Since 2018, ‘A Shape of Taste’ has been one of Heejoon Lee’s signature series. This body of work was inspired by the transformed landscapes of Seoul that the artist encountered upon returning from years of studying in the UK. Confronted with a city that felt both familiar and unfamiliar, Lee began to reexamine the diverse colors and geometric forms that define the neighborhoods he has lived in, capturing them through a fresh perspective.

Heejoon Lee documented the rapidly changing architecture and streetscape through photography, printed the images, and then added drawings on top before translating them into paintings. Through this iterative process, the urban landscape was gradually distilled into highly simplified, square-format abstract paintings. 

Meanwhile, the 2022 works from ‘A Shape of Taste’, presented three years after the previous pieces in the series, show a shift from strictly following the initial drawings. Instead, Lee incorporates his own visual language—small squares, dots, and other subtle elements—interspersed throughout the compositions, adding new layers of interpretation.

Since 2019, Heejoon Lee’s interest in space has expanded beyond the two-dimensional plane into three-dimensional forms. He began deconstructing, disassembling, and reconfiguring his color-field abstract paintings to create miniature sculptures that physically occupy space.

By constructing small spaces in gallery corners and installing scaled-down versions of his abstract works within them—or transforming his paintings into sculptural forms—Lee has created an environment that navigates the boundaries between different media.

The ‘The Tourist’ series, unveiled in 2020, was created around the theme of how we store and recall travel memories. The artist reflects on how, during a trip, the habit of taking photos with a phone replaces the joy of experiencing the moment with the pleasure of storing it as a small file in a data memory chip.

This idea led to the creation of the photo-collage work ‘The Tourist,’ which brings memories existing as photo data on a phone into the realm of painting. The work explores how we consume and remember experiences, memories, emotions, and sensations.

To achieve this, the artist printed the photos taken during the travels, collaging them onto the canvas. On top of the images, the artist expressed the sensory impressions—touch, sight, smell—engraved in the landscape through elements like dots, lines, shapes, curves, and color.

This photo-collage approach was further refined in the ‘Image Architect’ series in 2021. The landscapes from the artist’s memories, which had previously been integrated into abstract color fields, are now exposed as concrete forms through photo-collage. Additionally, the artist builds up layers of various colors, drawing lines, and geometric shapes, dividing the space and creating new surfaces, thereby both revealing and erasing the space within the composition.

The technique of applying thick paint over black-and-white photographs and emphasizing texture creates a new layer and texture in the artist's abstract paintings. At the same time, it results in an architectural outcome that layers the artist's memories, sensations, and time, building them up in a rich and intricate way.

In Heejoon Lee's recent works, different times and spaces intertwine and overlap within a single canvas. The process of connecting and combining entirely unrelated photos stored in a photo album through painting creates a new narrative, blurring the boundaries between the past and present, reality and imagination, and presenting a fresh visual experience.

This trend is clearly reflected in the large-scale painting Eclipse: Overlapping Time and Unfolding Space (2024), showcased in the 2024 group exhibition 《Space Time Scenarios》 at the Seoul Museum of Art. The work intertwines the architectural characteristics of the museum’s Seosomun building with the artist's experiences of the museum over time, merging them into a single cohesive piece.

Heejoon Lee collages photographs of architectural structures taken at different times, and expresses his memories and sensations of these spaces through geometric painting language, layering them within a single canvas. The multilayered spatiotemporal elements in these paintings later transform into foldable sculptural forms, becoming even more dynamic and architecturally interconnected.

In this way, Heejoon Lee continues to focus on his surroundings, visualizing the aesthetic sensations of the landscapes and his associated memories through the language of abstract painting. His works provide a moment of pause in the rapidly changing urban environment we live in, offering us time to reflect on and imagine everyday moments.

"As I layer the paint, I approach the sensations more finely, capturing the emotions, thoughts, sensations, or memories that change with time. The small forms floating across the canvas trigger other memories and sensations, guiding the viewer's contemplation to a new point." (Heejoon Lee, excerpted from a BE(ATTITUDE) interview)

Heejoon Lee graduated from Hongik University with a Bachelor’s degree in Painting and Sculpture, and received his Master’s degree in Fine Arts at Glasgow School of Art. His recent solo exhibitions include 《Heejoon Lee》 (Kukje Gallery, Busan, 2022), 《Image Architect》 (Incheon Art Platform, Incheon, 2021), 《The Tourist》 (L’espace 71, Seoul, 2020), 《Emerald Skin》(Yeemock Gallery, Seoul 2017), and more.

He has participated in group exhibitions at institutions such as Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, 2024), SONGEUN (Seoul, 2022), Art Sonje Center (Seoul, 2021), SeMA Nam-Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, 2019), Museum San (Wonju, 2019), Hakgojae Gallery (Seoul, 2018), Akureyri Art Museum (Akureyri, Iceland, 2016), and more. He also administered a new exhibition space, ‘No Toilet’ (2014-2015) and presented multiple exhibitions.

He has been a participant in Neoterismoi Toumazou (Nicosia, Cyprus) residency, and his work is included in the public collection of Seoul Metropolitan City, MMCA Art Bank, and Seoul Museum of Art.

References

• 이희준, Heejoon Lee (Artist Website) 
• 오픈갤러리, 기고자, Interior nor Exterior: Prototype (Open Gallery, Kigoja, Interior nor Exterior: Prototype) 
• 김시습, 회화의 막, 2017 (Si Seup Kim, An Outer Layer of Painting, 2017)
• 인천문화통신 3.0, 인천아트플랫폼 입주 예술가: 이은새, 이희준, 정금형, 2021.08.17 
• 국제갤러리, 이희준 개인전 (Kukje Gallery, Heejoon Lee Solo Exhibition) 
• 비애티튜드, 결국, 회화에 관한 질문