The birth of the Western/modern landscape painting presupposed a dominating gaze—a perspective based on maintaining a proper and safe distance from the object (“the gaze of prospect”). In contrast, the Eastern/pre-modern landscape painting (for instance, what is called sansu-hwa, traditional ink landscapes) allowed the imagination of encounter and intermingling with the object (“the gaze of immersion”).

Such a dichotomy of perspectives toward landscape can be re-examined in contemporary terms as a complex dynamic between landscape and subject—specifically, as a particular mode in which the subject perceives or positions itself within the world. Whether as a critique of the disappearing subject from the landscape, or as an affirmation of the sign produced by landscape as reality, the landscape is no longer a transparent field of visibility, but rather an allegory for seeing the world—a contemporary episteme that reflects our visual thought of the time.

In Haevan Lee’s practice, landscape is newly conceptualized—not as the representation of a particular site, but as a reconstruction of impressions of the world derived from a site.

(From here on, I will regard what he sees and paints as “landscape,” and examine what kind of world his landscapes construct.)

First, his work reconstructs the arrangement of objects and things within a vast landscape, rather than within the confined, enclosed space of a room focused on individual figures.

Second, it materializes the notion of “landscape” within the canvas, establishing a meta-landscape by objectifying it pictorially.

Third, the landscape takes on a mutable quality—his thoughts and the movements of the environment synchronize with the transformations of the landscape.

Objectified or Divided Landscapes

If the canvas is a thing, painting mystifies it as an empty sign. Conversely, if painting itself is a thing, the canvas concretizes it as an empty signifier. Haevan Lee precisely and swiftly anchors his images onto the canvas in various forms—this precision is one measurable point amid the differences in the artist’s production, which resists being unified under a single subject or style.

Thus, rather than serving as the boundary of a vanishing explosion, the canvas becomes a sign that distinctly delineates the boundary between itself and reality. In other words, Lee constructs painting not as an image, but as an objectified canvas—as the installation of an image.

《Goliath, Tank》(2018) consists of paintings rendered on wooden boards cut to the outlines of objects resembling tanks, each equipped with pendulums that swing incessantly. The “wooden board as canvas” momentarily divides the world where painting stagnates. (Here, we may conceptualize the “canvas” not as the literal fabric used for oil painting, but as the flat plane that presupposes the possibility of painting and, at the same time, as the object that enables its installation.)

The form of the wooden board, as another signifier, refers to the tank in the title, the site of the exhibition—Peace Culture Bunker—and even the theme of the exhibition itself. It clarifies the signified of the work, overturning or subordinating the details of painting into a kind of background. The pendulum attached to the tank-shaped structure swings rapidly, suggesting that the stagnant time since the Korean War must be accelerated in order to be measured in the present.

On the surface, the form (the canvas) seems to confine the image (the painting), and the image appears to lose its individuality and inherent power. Yet, could such an inversion between figure and ground not be seen as the formation of a single plane? Lee’s painting is not segmented within a large plane, nor merely divided by the frame; rather, it resides within the boundary. In fact, the artist does not paint on a square canvas and then cut it apart—he paints directly on canvases already cut into shape.

Thus, division does not function as the concealment of what has been removed, nor as an imagined possibility of visibility, but instead constructs surface and world through the curved seams of those divisions. The form goes beyond composing the world—it reorganizes the very perspective through which the world is seen. Such a method of “division” transforms painting into a signifier of the object itself, an installation composed of the image-canvas.

At Hongcheon Museum of Art, the series of nine works titled On the Road presented small paintings on square canvases. These were reconfigurations of images conceived during the DOPA Project’s journey across Siberia, combined with scenes inspired by the artist’s observations in Hongcheon. The phrase “TRANS RAINBOW,” repeatedly written across the canvases, appears not from a frontal view but at a diagonal angle, emerging through a mode of viewing that involves walking along the works—connecting them, as if linking the bodies of train cars.

Re-narrated or Synchronized Landscapes

Each of Haevan Lee’s works carries its own narrative; thus, they do not converge into a single theme or reduce into a consistent style. Except for those in which a rocket being launched and another already flying overlap in temporal adjacency, most of his images are enclosed within independent, self-contained frames—each constituting a distinct landscape. For example, in one work, a creature with the face of a bird and the body of a human is set against a background inspired by a landscape in Hongcheon. Yet, the landscape here is not directly tied to a specific location; it has lost its original context. Lee’s landscapes are grounded less in the representation of objects than in a self-awareness of how the object is depicted.

In addition to generating new landscapes through figurative combinations and imagined transfers, it is also notable that these landscapes originate from the artist’s immediate environment. Seen from a train, the landscape is not fixed but variable, and yet it maintains a certain flow—appearing less as a series of discrete images and more as a continuous panorama. In one of the On the Road paintings that captures this scenery, thick swathes of paint are pushed and dragged across the surface. This is not the result of deliberate brushstrokes, but rather an attempt to visualize the “passing” landscape—the view that slips by during motion.

The Mt. Geumgang Seen from 707OP painting series, depicting the mountain beyond the DMZ, is at first glance simplified and bold in brushwork, reminiscent of traditional Korean jingyeong sansuhwa (true-view landscape painting). The movements and rhythms of the mountain forms are molded into a peculiar configuration, as though they were organic, living entities. (The accompanying drawings on paper preserve this structure even more clearly.) The seemingly subdued landscapes are, in fact, condensed representations of vast scenes through broad, heavy brushstrokes, thereby substituting weight with compression. Here, painting reproduces not the object itself but the impression of the object.

From the artist’s retinal experience—looking at the black void (a bunker) seen through the giant telescope at the Unification Observatory toward Mt. Geumgang—the image captured through the lens becomes both the mediated and condensed version of reality. If we consider the telescope as a transparent medium, painting emerges as a flat plane unmediated by that lens. The synthesis of these two viewpoints reflects the transformation of an unreachable distance into one that can be visually reached, reconstructing Mt. Geumgang in a strange, almost uncanny form. The painting allows us to momentarily forget the impossibility of traversing that distance.

When traced back to his drawings—indeed, these could be seen as another distinct mode of practice rather than mere preparatory studies—Haevan Lee’s painting retains the process of drawing itself. If one regards this as an ordinary mechanism of contemporary painting, Lee’s specificity lies in gaining autonomy of expression not within the limits of representational possibility tied to site, but through freedom of expression derived from the site itself. For the artist, what matters is not the representation of reality but the reflection of experiential reality—a distinction that sustains the autonomy of painting.

Returning to the nine paintings of On the Road, the installation unfolds sequentially: beginning on the left with two mountains of Gangwon Province, followed by fleeting landscapes, three figures in a forest, rockets being launched and already in flight, the interior of a train with a window frame, another train compartment with two beds and window frames, and finally, a sunset scene.

This progression effectively designs the flow of a journey—from static moments to moving perspectives, through dreamlike, imaginative dimensions where movement and memory intertwine into fragmentary images. Like speech bubbles emerging from a dreamer’s head, and given the uniform square format of the paintings, these works originated from the artist’s initial plan to compile them as a sketchbook with a narrative structure—although they ultimately took the form of paintings.

A sketchbook presupposes both a code of division through identical frames and a temporal flow of narrative continuity through their accumulation. If On the Road is viewed as an extension of such a sketchbook, Lee’s paintings can be understood not as moments of depth, but as spans of continuity—structured horizontally rather than vertically. If each were to be individually titled and accompanied by separate texts in a handout, the paintings could acquire the quality of signifiers—transforming the act of viewing into an act of reading. Thus, the nine paintings can be perceived both as an integrated series and as works that resist individual partitioning by title.

Alliance of Object–Being–Landscape

The works presented in ‘The Holy Garden’(2016) series encapsulate the three defining characteristics of Haevan Lee’s landscapes. They serve as both a knot in the chronological thread of his practice and as a hollowed territory of latent potential that summons his earlier and later works alike. Within the articulation between painting and installation—what could be called the “re-objectification of painting” or the “re-painting of objects”—a strange alliance emerges between being and world.

In the first Rainbow Birdcage, the world is rendered as a vast aviary, and the white bird positioned between the two circular forms on either side and the triangular object in the center becomes a being-object that both exists within the world and hovers at its threshold. This uncanny creature—both an inhabitant of and an outsider to the world—is framed within the boundaries of the birdcage-world. It is the white Hahoetal mask, however, that ultimately knots and seals this painted world.

The Hahoetal mask remains outside the pictorial world yet inside the birdcage-world, never truly escaping it. The pale pink panel containing three objects—the circular, triangular, and mask forms—constitutes a transformed version of the canvas, a “painting beyond painting.”

The Hahoetal mask, positioned vertically apart from the pictorial field yet tethered to it, simultaneously connects and points to the dual realms of painting and canvas. The frame of the actual canvas, interlocked with the lower jaw of the Hahoetal, partitions the painting as a closed frame.

By contrast, in the second Rainbow Birdcage, the frame connected to the Hahoetal disappears, replaced by a deliberate gap that still, at just the right distance, subsumes the entire painting within its embrace—forming, in essence, an empty frame. This internal dialectic between the pictorial and the material—the conceptual pair of painting and canvas—exemplifies one of the artist’s key methods for transforming painting into installation. The birdcage, as a frame, can thus be reconsidered as an analogy for Lee’s approach to installing paintings.

In accordance with the title Rainbow Birdcage, only the birdcage’s frame itself bears the colors of the rainbow. Consequently, what the title refers to is a literal, almost factual element of the composition. Yet this single linguistic reference—the rainbow’s embodiment as an object rather than a background—reveals the inversion of the world. The birdcage functions as a peculiar visual field, a device of inversion.

In the world outside the birdcage, it seems to be the time of sunset; within, the garden world is illuminated by artificial light and enveloped in darkness. From these two distinct viewpoints, one may infer that the birdcage’s surface is not open but functions as a translucent, opaque frame continuous with the rainbow-colored cage. Here, the rainbow—an effect of sunlight—is paradoxically a transparent yet concealing signifier: it hides the closed world while simultaneously revealing its closure. Metaphorically, the rainbow speaks of hope, but in literal terms, it is the only element that proves the birdcage’s physical existence.

Within this structure, the bird appears not as a captive but as an observer—the only conscious being gazing upon the landscape of the cage. The bird, under a specific affective atmosphere, represents not merely an animal but a personified, anonymized presence—perhaps even the artist’s psychoanalytic surrogate. What, then, does the bird gaze upon: the landscape itself, or the world beyond it? Its gaze is that of a split or disassembling world—a schizophrenic vision that fractures reality.

The white bird, poised at the boundary between landscape and world, corresponds to the white Hahoetal mask that defines the boundary between cage and world.

Yet, while the mask marks the exterior of the painting, the bird resides within it—positioned at the edge where the world is both generated and receding. The bird remains inside the painting, indicating the outside world without ever fully revealing its contact with it. This distinction separates the white bird from the white Hahoetal mask, which, though adjacent to the canvas, conceals its interface with the world beyond.

The bird is both a being subsumed by landscape and a landscape subsumed by being.

In Rainbow Birdcage, the upright bird becomes the horizon and the measure of the world itself. Yet, as a spectator of the world, the bird remains ambiguously positioned within the cage. No exit from this world is sought or supported—perhaps the real world can only be glimpsed momentarily through fleeting cracks and intervals. The bird’s position simply constructs a world that opens and closes within a specific field of vision. Through this position, we may identify the origin of Haevan Lee’s perspective on landscape—the point where his way of seeing takes root.

Outro

Since Rainbow Birdcage, Haevan Lee has continued to construct a singular narrative through painting. He once remarked that he wanted to show a person inside a birdcage the vivid, multicolored world outside it — a statement that produces a voice distinct from his own artist’s statement. This other world is absorbed into the cycle of narrative. Its story is one that endlessly self-replicates — a two-dimensional plane extending into three dimensions, a different kind of landscape inherited from landscape itself.

The shifts along this border do not suggest a leap beyond the world but reveal the dot-matrix narrative through which the world is constructed. “Not the invisible itself, but the reconstruction of vision.” This is formed within the artist’s impression inscribed in presence — the imagination that grows with the process of dreaming, and the figurative dimension that embodies a physical foundation. It is not the representation of landscape, but the production of landscape itself. So how, then, might the world end? Or rather, how might the world begin?

Haevan Lee constructs the relationship between landscape and the subject within it by imagining a speaker outside the painting and a gaze inside it. If the destination of this narrative is considered not as its conclusion but as its effect, then the narrative is not a linear story but a murmur disguised as one — not a record between beginning and end, but a landscape that traverses the present and the body. Whether this narrative ultimately becomes pure fiction or a voyage toward fiction remains unknown.

Nor is it certain whether the painterly investigation of medium will eventually be indicated outside the realm of narrative. Finally, painting is also a material. The matière of Haevan Lee’s painting — its substance — has yet to be fully addressed. Perhaps we must await the moment after the experience when it can at last be contemplated and brought to the surface.

References

• [비평] 이해반, ‘가변적 풍경을 직조하다’
  [Critique] Haevan Lee, Weaving Variable Landscapes