Rhee Donghoon (b.1991) navigates between the traditional mediums of sculpture and painting, continually exploring the relationship between the three-dimensional and the two-dimensional. His practice involves closely observing living subjects such as plants, trees, and human figures, which he carves into wooden sculptures. These sculpted still lifes then become the subjects of his paintings.

At the beginning of his practice, Rhee Donghoon explored the question, “What should I paint, and how?” by translating literary works into the language of painting. From 2015 to 2016, he focused on transforming literary narratives into flat images, experimenting with the formal logic of painting. Over time, his interest shifted toward the structure of the canvas frame itself.

Around 2017, Rhee began constructing his own frames to emphasize the materiality of the canvas. These works marked a transitional phase toward his more recent wooden sculptures. Rather than focusing on subject matter within the picture plane, his attention during this period was on the intimate interplay between the form of the canvas and the framework of the painting.

To this end, he taught himself woodworking techniques to “sculpt” the very support of the painting—an approach that would eventually lead him into sculpture in earnest.

Since 2018, instead of carving wooden frames, Rhee Donghoon has brought in potted plants—objects typically found in still-life paintings—as subjects for direct observation, carving their forms out of wood. His sculptural practice, which began with these works, avoids detailing fine contours or textures. Instead, he uses power saws and chisels to shape large, blocky forms, and then paints their surfaces in colors resembling the real-life subjects.

His early still-life sculptures, often depicting vases and flowerpots, clearly function as three-dimensional pictorial supports—sculptural structures made for “painting.” Art critic Ahn Soyeon noted in Rhee’s works a performative quality, observing that they not only act as physical supports like canvas frames that allow for painterly gestures such as drawing and painting, but also challenge the pictorial possibilities of rendering three-dimensional objects as flattened images, echoing the conventions of mimesis.

Since 2019, Rhee Donghoon's still-life sculptures have expanded beyond flowers to include a broader range of flora and fauna, such as birds, cats, and fruit. While earlier works based on vases or flowerpots were typically small enough to sit on a tabletop, this period marked a shift toward life-sized sculptures that stand directly on the floor.

One such piece, A Flamingo and Grass (2019), which stands at 164 cm tall, is composed of an upper and lower section joined vertically, resembling two logs connected together. The sculpture features contours carved three-dimensionally from a cylindrical log, and despite its volumetric form, the repeated right angles and painted surface—shaded to suggest perspective and depth—evoke a painterly illusion.

In his first solo exhibition 《Room with Flowers》 (DrawingRoom, 2019), Rhee Donghoon presented his hand-carved still-life sculptures alongside paintings of those very sculptures, placing the two side by side on display. Moving beyond his earlier practice of carving directly from observed still-life objects, the artist began using his own wooden sculptures as new subjects for painting. The carved objects, shaped in response to the materiality of wood, underwent another process of abstraction as they were translated back into the flat surface of the canvas by the artist’s hand.

These resulting sculptures and paintings were juxtaposed in the exhibition space like mirror images, forming an intimate and latent dialogue between the two mediums—each echoing the other in ways that were both alike and subtly different.

Rhee’s still-life sculptures prioritize the perception of form through color and shading applied to the surface, rather than through realistic three-dimensional modeling. Saturated hues and painted shadows define the planes of each form. In contrast, the paintings that take these sculptures as their subjects flatten all perspectives onto a uniform two-dimensional plane. As a result, the sense of volume and spatial depth typically associated with real-life objects is removed, rendering the images visually flat and compressed.

Continuing his exploration of the relationship between real-life objects, sculpture, and painting, Rhee presented Untitled (2020), a work that merges several individually referenced subjects into a single pictorial frame. This painting draws from three previously created works: Flower Vase (2020), Magic Lily (2020), and Cactus (2020).

However, in this composite painting, perspective and spatial depth are not unified. Instead, each object appears to be rendered with its own abstract field of color, resulting in a visual composition that resembles a collage.

In his second solo exhibition 《The Statue Knows How to Dance》 (2021) at Gallery SP, Rhee introduced a new body of figurative sculptures that he began developing in earnest in 2020. These human figures were inspired by the choreography and stage costumes of K-pop idols, focusing on the three-dimensional forms created through the fusion of movement and attire during performances.

Rather than approaching the human body from an anatomical perspective, the artist reconstructs the sculptural structure of bodies captured in moments of continuous motion, reimagining them from his own unique point of view.

Rhee’s sculptures, based on the movement of the human figure, disregard the linear flow of time by overlapping several seconds of continuous choreography into a single form. As a result, the relatively still torso is rendered as-is, while the hands and arms—rapidly moving in the rhythm of dance—appear duplicated and layered.

Through this superimposition of bodily gestures, his sculptures encapsulate the continuity of physical motion while simultaneously fixing it into the static body of an object.

The painting work was created by placing the sculpture, which was initially made, on a turntable and capturing the rotating sculpture as a panorama. The resulting image was then used as the basis for the painting. This approach can be seen as an attempt to reproduce the sculpture, but rather than focusing on the object with physical mass, it aims to transfer the colors and textures emerging from the sculpture onto the two-dimensional plane.

With the intervention of a virtual image mediated by a camera between still-life sculpture and painting, his work embodies the contemporary visual sensitivity shaped by digital editing and technology within the medium-specific conditions of sculpture and painting.

In his subsequent works, the method of rotating the sculpture and referencing the photos taken of the different cross-sections during its rotation continued. In the 2022 exhibition 《New Rising Artist》 at the Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art, he presented still-life sculptures based on flowerpots or vases, as well as paintings derived from them.

In his earlier works, the process involved observing and capturing the color fields of a stationary still-life sculpture and abstracting them into painting. In this recent work, however, the color fields revealed in the surfaces of the sculpture and the layers of paint applied on top, as captured in the photograph, were arranged consecutively in a horizontal direction on the canvas.

Meanwhile, in his 2023 solo exhibition 《Light Choreography》 at Gallery SP, Rhee Donghoon presented works that were created using thin, lightweight paper instead of the wood he had previously used as the main material for his sculptures. These works were inspired by K-pop choreography, transforming it into sculptural form.

Rhee's paper works began from a curiosity about how the form of a sculpture would change when the material properties were altered. He believed that the properties of paper, which allow for free changes in form, would be more interesting for capturing the dynamic movements and poses of K-pop idols, whose actions are constantly changing and evolving.

He mixed the colors and contrasts of the referenced stage using acrylic paint and created colored paper that expressed the sense of speed of the choreography with an underpainting brush. Then, using knives and scissors, he delicately formed the volume and contours before assembling the pre-prepared parts to complete the artwork.

The paper's characteristics of bending, wrinkling, and folding naturally aligned with the dynamic movements of the choreography and were fixed momentarily using pins, tacks, glue, wire, and other materials. Through this repeated layering process, the paper works, built in a collage style, convey a different, lighter, and more vibrant clarity compared to the previous wooden sculptures and paintings, which had a distinct heavy weight.

Meanwhile, the ‘Compilation’ (2023) series, a paper relief work that fills the wall in an independent form outside the context of the individual pieces, was created on-site rather than in the studio. The artist enlarged or edited parts of the choreography, then, using the flexible properties of paper and the large wall space with low ceilings in the exhibition venue, abstracted the trajectory of the choreography into a massive relief.
 
The reliefs created in this way were either temporarily deconstructed with pins, fixed to the wall in an expanded form, or parts of the wall were repainted and placed in the three-dimensional space, creating a fluid variation throughout the exhibition.

Thus, Rhee Donghoon has primarily followed a method where he first carves the form based on the texture of wood to capture the dynamic movement of living subjects, and then arranges and revisits the sculpture on the canvas in a secondary process, constructing a formal aesthetic. Recently, he has been experimenting with new textures and forms using paper as a material, further deepening his exploration of the relationship between subject, material, sculpture, and painting.

“My sculpture started with the question of how to paint. I still look at the subject and paint, but it is not done through the method of observing and depicting the subject based on light, shadow, and form.

What I reproduce through painting is the process of rearranging and revisiting the result of the sculpture from the perspectives of the eye and the camera, through color. It is an act of recalling the attitude I could have had in the realm of sculpture through painting.” (Rhee Donghoon, Artist's Note)

Rhee Donghoon graduated with a BFA in Painting from Kyung Hee University and completed his MFA at Seoul National University of Science and Technology. His solo exhibitions include 《Room with Flowers》 (DrawingRoom, Seoul, 2019), 《The Statue Knows How to Dance》 (Gallery SP, Seoul, 2021), 《Woman》 (VSF&milk, Los Angeles, USA, 2022), and 《Light Choreography》 (Gallery SP, Seoul, 2023).

Additionally, he has participated in numerous group exhibitions such as 《UNBOXING PROJECT 3.2: Maquette》 (VSF, Los Angeles, USA, 2024), 《grid 3》 (Biscuit Gallery, Tokyo, 2024), the 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale (Changwon, 2023), 《Sculptural Impulse》 (SeMA Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022), 《NEW RISING ARTIST》 (Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art, Jeju, 2022), and 《Object Universe》 (Ulsan Art Museum, Ulsan, 2022). He will also participate in the upcoming group exhibition 《Crush Zone》 at Gallery SP on May 8.

In terms of projects and collaborations, he has been involved in 《Grave Monument》 (Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2021) and 《Hong Seung-Hye Solo Exhibition: On Stage》 (Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, 2021). His works are housed in MMCA Art Bank, Ulsan Art Museum, and Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art.

References

• 이동훈, Rhee Donghoon (Artist Website) 
• 안소연, “내 조각이 회화적인 이유는” 
• 드로잉룸, 꽃이 있는 실내 (DrawingRoom, Room with Flowers)
• 갤러리SP, 조각이 춤도 추네요 (Gallery SP, The Statue Knows How to Dance)
• 갤러리SP, 가벼운 안무 (Gallery SP, Light Choreography)
• 사진바다, 이동훈 개인전: 조각이 춤도 추네요, 2021.07.06