Heejoon Lee, Coffee Farm, 2019, acrylic on photocollage, 73 x 73cm © Heejoon Lee

L’espace 71 presents 《The Tourist》, a solo exhibition by Heejoon Lee, from March 13 to April 12. This marks Lee’s first solo exhibition at L’espace 71, where approximately 15 new works will be on view. These works explore the specificity of contemporary experience through the artist’s distinctive painterly language. Heejoon Lee has long collected and restructured visual elements from urban architecture and interior spaces to construct painterly surfaces. In ‘The Tourist’, his most recent series, Lee adopts photo-collage techniques to layer photographic and painted images, articulating the shifting dimension of experience produced by the entanglement of digital environments and perceptual cognition. L’espace 71 hopes that viewers will encounter a vivid, reflective experience by confronting the painterly surfaces of ‘The Tourist’ with their own sensory memories.

A key theme in Lee’s work is “perceptual experience.” Since returning from his studies abroad in 2015, Lee has pursued a kind of “travel” through the city—an attempt to defamiliarize the everyday urban landscape and expose the raw face of experience that typically goes unnoticed. In his 2016 series ‘Interior nor Exterior’, he encouraged viewers to uncover latent meanings embedded in the surfaces of daily urban life. Through ongoing painterly experiments centered on perception and experience, his 2019 series ‘A Shape of Taste’ explored how digital experiences in contemporary society shape perception, using processes of cropping and editing images found in the city. In this context, Lee’s current exhibition furthers his exploration by sharpening his sensory engagement with how digital imagery occupies much of our experiential realm today.

Heejoon Lee began ‘The Tourist’ series out of an interest in how the digital consumption of images during travel affects our lived experience. In our society, it has become commonplace to photograph travel destinations with a smartphone and post them on social media. Lee, whose work is based on images experienced through present, perceptual encounters, was drawn to this cultural behavior. His process—printing smartphone images taken while traveling and arranging them as photo collages on canvas—reveals the gap between technological traces and lived experience, and how each retains different textures of memory. By incorporating geometric and abstract elements, Lee reactivates past experiences on the surface of the canvas, generating layers of meaning in the process.

Lee questions whether the expansion of social communication through smartphones, cameras, and social media compresses the depth of our experience or facilitates its transformation into another dimension. Conventionally, “experience” implies a cognitive layer achieved through perception. However, in today’s image-saturated context, digital imagery permeates much of our experiential sphere, prompting new questions about what kind of experience remains possible. According to philosopher Gilbert Simondon, human beings and technological objects are not necessarily caught in relationships of domination and subordination but can coexist through dynamic interrelations. Seen in this light, the operation of digital images in our daily lives reveals an ever-shifting landscape of experience. These images, embedded in our perceptual field, become part of the environment that enables the emergence of new experiential worlds. Through this ambivalence about contemporary experience, Heejoon Lee seeks to locate an emotional and painterly resonance within the rapid transformations shaping our time.

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