Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

She has held solo exhibitions at institutions such as L21 (Mallorca, Spain, 2023), PHD Group (Hong Kong, 2022, 2023), Ilmin Museum of Art(Seoul, 2021), Alternative Space Loop (Seoul, 2018), Gallery2 (Seoul, 2016, 2020, 2023), and Gallery Chosun (Seoul, 2015).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Recent group exhibitions Lee has participated in include 《Art Spectrum: Dream Screen》 (Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024), 《Gulp》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2024), 《Hexed, Vexed and Sexed》 (West Den Haag, Hague, NL, 2023), 《Minimalism-Maximalism-Mechanissmmm Act 1–Act 2》 (Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2022), 《Young Korean Artists 2019: Liquid Glass Sea》 (MMCA, Gwacheon, 2019), and more.

Awards (Selected)

Lee was selected as an artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2025-2026) and has previously participated in residencies at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in the Netherlands (2023-2025), Incheon Art Platform (2021), MMCA Goyang Residency (2020), and SeMA Nanji Residency (2019).

Collections (Selected)

Her works are part of collections at the Seoul Museum of Art.

Originality & Identity

Eunsae Lee explores the anxieties faced by young women in Korean society and their resistance through a painterly language. In her early works, she focused on capturing subtle instabilities observed in daily life. In Stone Throwing #2 (2012), she depicted the physical ripples caused by a stone thrown into a tranquil pond, metaphorically extending these disturbances to the emotional resonance experienced by the observer. This approach soon expanded to a broader social context, connecting personal experiences with societal events, thereby infusing her paintings with a heightened sense of tension.

A key theme in Lee’s work is resistance against objectification. In ㅗㅗ (2016) and The Girls of the Viking (2016), she critically examines the way media consumes and commodifies women’s bodies, capturing moments where objectified figures assert their agency. In her ‘Night Monsters’(2018) series, intoxicated women are not merely depicted as vulnerable or defenseless but instead as confrontational and even menacing figures.

Her recent works further deepen this painterly exploration by intertwining personal experiences with historical narratives. In her 2023 solo exhibition 《Mite Life》 at Gallery2, she merged the Buddhist monk Wonhyo’s skull water parable with her own experience of drinking stale water, illustrating how seemingly trivial moments can trigger shifts in perception. Lee’s practice continues to dismantle societal preconceptions while investigating how fleeting sensory experiences acquire meaning through painting.

Style & Contents

Lee primarily works with oil painting, often on large-scale canvases exceeding 100 ho (approximately 160 x 130 cm). She has progressively intensified her painterly expression and experimented with new materials to push her formal approach. In Forced View (2016), depicting an eye surgery scene, she inverted the traditional dynamics of gaze by crossing the perspectives of the protagonist, the doctor, the artist, and the viewer, subverting the relationship between seeing and being seen. Following this, she increasingly emphasized the thickness and texture of paint, as seen in Rubbing the Eyes (2017), where she heightened the grotesqueness of the depicted figure through painterly materiality.

In ‘Night Monsters’, she maximized expressive potential through thickly layered paint, aggressive brushwork, and bold color contrasts. In her 2020 solo exhibition 《As Usual》 at Gallery2, she experimented with airbrush techniques, creating exaggerated, fluid imagery. Additionally, in her 2021 solo exhibition 《IMA Picks 2021 - Dear My Heart-Angel-God 》 at Ilmin Museum of Art, she incorporated PET film and metallic surfaces into her canvases, extending the boundaries of painting.

Her 《Mite Life》 marked a return to still-life painting as a mode of exploration. Works such as Mite Life 1 (2023) and Mite Life 4 (2023) utilized water (or alcohol) as a motif symbolizing emotional transformation and shifts in perception. By navigating the intersections between documentation and experience, still life and living form, reality and fantasy, she continues to evolve her painterly approach.

Topography & Continuity

Lee’s work has developed through a unique fusion of formal experimentation and social critique. Since her ‘Night Monsters’ series, presented at Alternative Space LOOP, her practice has increasingly emphasized materiality and painterly experimentation, further articulating provocative female imagery.

She continues to investigate the tension between media representations of women and contemporary painterly discourse, consistently expanding the conceptual and technical boundaries of painting. Her work is gaining recognition not only in Korea but also internationally, with exhibitions in Spain, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, and Japan. Moving forward, Lee is expected to continue evolving her distinctive visual language while engaging with global contemporary art discourses.