Yoonseo Lee

Yoonseo Lee's paintings swiftly record the afterimages of the flood of information we receive through our smartphones—one afterimage following another. In this process, she captures today’s landscape, which has lost its depth and flows quickly in pursuit of novelty and stimulation. Visualizing the erosion of thoughtful engagement and the disconnection brought about by rapid transitions, her paintings reflect the state of the world we are living in, where information circulates incessantly, losing context, distorting and transforming, and accumulating in a state of reserve without resolution. Rather than reproducing images of information, the images that fail (to reproduce) under the rapid brushstrokes reveal the inherent inability of the medium of painting itself to keep up with the volume and speed of information, and the artist’s swift switching of topics reveals the gap between input and output. Recording an instantaneous shift in thought in the classical medium of painting is an expression of her personal desire to borrow and taxidermy the short-lived visual language of the present by borrowing a language that has survived the long hours of the past. It’s also a self-portrait of how a generation caught in a time of fast and rapid transition digests the present. Lee graduated from Korea National University of Arts with a BFA in Plastic Arts and Art History. In 2015, she held her first solo exhibition, <Bigfoot Reference> at Ghana Art Space, and has since held many solo exhibitions at places including Gallery Chosun’s <Painting Painted Painting> in 2023. She was selected for the Seoul Arts Foundation’s Next Kakao Story Funding Program.