Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

She has held six solo exhibitions until the present. The exhibitions was held at various spaces such as Alternative Space POOL(Seoul, Korea), Project Space SARUBIA(Seoul, Korea), Doosan Gallery(New York, USA), UARTSPACE(Seoul, Korea). In 2021, gallery P21(Seoul, Korea) in Itaewon held its solo exhibition in two years under the title 《Unstable Dimension》.

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Lee Eunsil has participated in a wide range of group exhibitions held at ARARIO Gallery(Cheonan, Korea), Wooyang(Gyeongju, Korea), Indipressoul Gallery(Seoul, Korea), Leeum Museum(Seoul, Korea), Purdy/Hicks Gallery(London, UK), Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art(Marugame, Japan), the National Museum of Contemporary Art(Gwacheon, Korea), Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art(Ansan, Korea) and Insa Art Spcae(Seoul, Korea).

Awards (Selected)

Lee Eunsil was awarded the second prize at the 19th SongEun ArtAward(SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation, Seoul Korea) and selected as the artist of the year of the 29th JoongAng Fine Arts Prize(The JoongAng, Seoul, Korea).

Collections (Selected)

Her works are in collections of museums such as Seoul Museum of Art(Seoul, Korea) and the National Museum of Contemporary Art Art Bank(Gwacheon, Korea).

Originality & Identity

Lee Eunsil’s paintings are provocative and may shock the viewers. For the audience to see her works in the exhibition hall, they may be conscious of other visitors and look around. The artist illustrates the things close to us but invisible or hidden.

Lee Eunsil uses materials and techniques of traditional painting to reveal human desires and social mechanisms that suppress them. The artist’s view of desire is the driving force that drives our society and the dimension of life that causes conflict and mental illness.

The artist Lee Eunsil spreads things that used to be often considered taboo, such as sexual intercourse and exertion. This includes strange skins and tangled tree vines, fine hairs fluttering beneath the surface of the water, red blood and secretions, male and female erect genitals, and beastlike creatures. These are the things that the power of the discriminatory structure and the frameworks created by society were so strongly suppressed that they could not be put into words.

The background of the painting, completed by repeated colouring and drying, feels like a thicky sunken deep sea. Secret and sexual images, natural objects that metaphorize human desires and bodies, appear in the stuffy and damp air like a misty fog.

“The inner wall is on the verge of collapse into the ground,
but in a situation of continuous sedimentation,
the messed up times and the essence of a situation are lost in our memories…”

The uniform norms required by society suppress the natural desires of humans and create divided and pathological selves. Lee Eunsil embodied the structure of the family and various life problems that appear in our society, and the image of ordinary people living in institutions that do not escape the framework.

To express these aspects of conflict and mental illness, the artist adopts the traditional methods and story materials of oriental paintings from the past. In Lee Eunsil’s paintings, the vividly wriggling tigers are immersed in animal instincts on behalf of humans, and the traditional houses in their dismantled form give the screen a structure with various meanings.

For Lee Eunsil, traditional painting media and life & reality are inexhaustible sources of art and expression. As an artistic observer, she views the aspect of desire revealed in the individual and society respectively. Through her works that visualize her latent dimensions, she hopes that her diverse and primal desires will be expressed to give greater vitality to our society.

Style & Contents

It seems to have flown into a scene from a traditional fairy tale in Lee Eunsil’s paintings. Even if traditional motifs are shown, it is illustrated as an unrealistic space due to a lack of realism. In addition, elements of various spaces, such as inside and outside the house frequently appear and you can interpret the meaning of each work by looking into how the structures function respectively.

The structure of the building like a traditional house divides the inside and the outside in the picture. The form of architecture functions as a frame that visually dividends the painting screen, and also serves as a symbol that reveals psychological and social meanings in the work. A ‘house’ image is a safe place or a space metaphorizing the relationship between home and family. Also, it can be a boundary that socially locks us in a frame.

The image shows the inside and outside, which are connected through a window or door, creating a structure of Gwaneum where you can see the opposite side. The interior is a space where secrets can be revealed. It is a place in the ‘inside’ where things that could not be seen from the outside are revealed and whispered. On the other hand, nature, such as light, wind, and water, flows freely between the inside and outside without being bound by the borders and oppression of these houses.

Sometimes, the boundary space is presented in the form of a rectangular room made of a thin and translucent film. Otherwise, the wall of the house disappears and is distorted into a warped shape, and the cuboid is also loosened and floated on the screen with countless random sides. The elements of space that have been dismantled in this work illustrate the controls of incomplete, sloppy, and almost lost functions.

In her previous work, Lee Eunsil has shown the distorted form of self and desire through virtual time and space. In her recent works, the description of the situation becomes more ambiguous, and she focuses more on expressing the aspects of an individual’s mental illness rather than the structure of sexual icons or conflicting relationships.

The artist asks the audience to find out individual aspects of life by depicting human beings gripped by anxiety, compulsion, lack, and division in a modern society that compels them to conform to prescribed values.

Topography & Continuity

Upon Lee Eunsil’s debut, she appeared in the Korean art world as a new and shocking artist. Even before the artist had her first solo exhibition, she was included in a group of 17 artists selected by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art for the exhibition 《Young Seeker 2008 I AM AN ARTIST》.

It is noteworthy that Lee Eunsil held a solo exhibition in several alternative spaces with strong spatiality, participated in 《Art Spectrum 2014》 at Leeum Museum of Art, and the 2013 special exhibition 《Revolt of Korean Painting》 at the Seoul Museum of Art. Lee Eunsil is the artist who showed the newest Korean painting that had never been seen before and is one of the emerging artists commonly introduced by most major art institutions in Korea.

Based on this attention, Lee Eunsil’s work was introduced several times in the United States in 2016. She participated in a group exhibition under the theme of 《Realistic Art on the Korean Peninsula》 at the American University Museum in Washington, D.C., and she held a solo exhibition at Doosan Gallery New York, where she continued to showcase 《Korean Paintings》.

It can be inferred that the Korean art world was intensely contemplating how to establish the identity of ‘Korean Art’ and how to inherit traditional painting to appeal to the world.

Lee Eunsil’s art world breaks free from the stereotypes fixed in Korean painting by putting a topic that has not been addressed before. As an artist who subversively expanded the stylistic diversity of Korean painting more than anyone else, Lee Eunsil occupies a unique position as a Korean painter. She is also constructing contemporary Korean paintings that do not remain in the tradition by continuously studying changes and developing new skills for her art.

Lee Eunsil has been raising questions about the discriminatory structure of our society and the concealment of desires while making new pictorial attempts. Like the appearance of a desire that suddenly appears on the surface of the water at some point but then subsides for a while, the artist is presenting her work with slow but steady breathing. It is crucial to keep an eye on how Lee Eunsil’s artwork will open up a new horizon for Korean painting again.