Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

His recent solo exhibitions include 《Heejoon Lee》 (Kukje Gallery, Busan, 2022), 《Image Architect》 (Incheon Art Platform, Incheon, 2021), 《Raw, Polished, Coated》 (Space So, Seoul, 2021), 《The Tourist》 (L’espace 71, Seoul, 2020), 《Emerald Skin》(Yeemock Gallery, Seoul 2017), and more.

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

He has participated in group exhibitions at institutions such as Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, 2024), SONGEUN (Seoul, 2022), Art Sonje Center (Seoul, 2021), SeMA Nam-Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, 2019), Museum San (Wonju, 2019), Hakgojae Gallery (Seoul, 2018), Akureyri Art Museum (Akureyri, Iceland, 2016), and more. He also administered a new exhibition space, ‘No Toilet’ (2014-2015) and presented multiple exhibitions.

Awards (Selected)

He has participated in artist residencies including Neoterismoi Toumazou (Nicosia, Cyprus, 2013), Incheon Art Platform (Incheon Foundation for Arts and Culture, 2021), and Seoul Art Space Geumcheon (Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, 2022). In 2019, he was selected as the first prize winner of the 'New Hero' award organized by Public Art magazine.

Collections (Selected)

His work is included in the public collection of Seoul Metropolitan City, MMCA Art Bank, and Seoul Museum of Art.

Originality & Identity

Heejoon Lee begins his practice with the act of walking through the city—an everyday gesture transformed into a mode of acute visual observation. His paintings capture the visual order embedded in urban architectural structures, street scenes, and interior environments, focusing on proportion, balance, and color. As seen in his first solo exhibition 《Interior nor Exterior: Prototype》 held at Kigoja in 2016, Lee explores the threshold between the exterior and interior in architectural spaces, focusing on the in-between zones that generate spatial and formal possibilities. The series ‘Interior nor Exterior’ (2015–) exemplifies his attempt to reconstruct design elements—such as marble or exposed concrete surfaces—into a new visual language.

His later series, ‘A Shape of Taste’ (2018–), emerged from his reencounter with the altered urban landscape of Seoul after studying in the UK. The works reflect on the distance between changing environments and personal memory. From 2020 onward, in works such as ‘The Tourist’ (2020–), The Temperature of Barcelona(2022), and Eclipse: Overlapping Time and Unfolding Space(2024), Lee began to focus on the overlapping and entangled nature of image, memory, and sensation. By assembling completely unrelated images and moments within a single canvas, he reflects on the fragmented nature of memory and the consumption of images in contemporary life, proposing a painterly response to the complexities of digital memory and urban temporality.

Style & Contents

Heejoon Lee’s formal language has evolved from representational painting to abstract planar compositions, installations, and photo-collages. In early works like Interior nor Exterior – Oil Drawing no.1-12(2015), he captured architectural structures through oil on paper. With Interior nor Exterior no.24-27(2016), he transitioned into abstract formats, constructing surfaces with vertical and horizontal planes using acrylic and marker. The 'Emerald Skin'(2017-) series focused on ephemeral interior phenomena such as shadows of blinds cast in changing light, offering a more intimate and perceptual reading of space.

Since 2019, his interest in spatiality extended to three-dimensional forms. In Sculpture upon Sculpture no.1(2019), he dismantled elements of his abstract paintings and reconstructed them into miniature sculptures that activate physical space. Works like A Dry Land(2020) and On Board a Ship(2022) mark a further shift through the integration of painting, drawing, and photo-collage. Lee’s multilayered compositions explore how memory, time, and sensation can coexist on a single surface. This culminates in large-scale works such as Eclipse: Overlapping Time and Unfolding Space(2024), where disparate temporalities are overlaid to visualize spatial complexity as both formal structure and temporal architecture.

Topography & Continuity

Heejoon Lee’s practice is marked by a consistent sensibility in capturing the aesthetics embedded in urban spaces and everyday landscapes, translating them into an abstract painterly language. Within the medium of painting, he has developed a distinct formative language—intersecting sensations, memories, spatial structures, and surface through vertical color planes, layered brushstrokes, and accumulated textures. Over time, his work has expanded beyond the pictorial plane into sculpture, installation, and photo-collage, reflecting a fluid and open-ended approach that continues to stretch the boundaries of contemporary abstraction.

Beginning with representational urban scenes, Lee’s trajectory has gradually evolved into cross-disciplinary experimentation, culminating in works such as the photo-collage-based series 'The Tourist’ and the spatial installation Folding Space, Synchronizing Time and Memories(2024). These projects blur the lines between genres in visual art, redefining painting as a sensory and conceptual mediator of contemporary urban experience. Today, Heejoon Lee stands as a distinctive voice among Korean contemporary painters—one whose work interweaves urbanity and memory, abstraction and architectural perception in a uniquely integrated visual language.