Heejoon Lee pays attention to the aesthetics of design pervading in various locations within the scenery surrounding our lives. He cautiously examines the proportions, balance, and colors of his surrounding environments and seeks subjects for his paintings. Through the process of expanding and editing his collection of sceneries, Lee creates abstract images composed of vertical and horizontal color-planes. He symbolizes the outer scenery and transfers it onto the canvas. In the process of reproducing the images with painting methods, he creates multiple layers and extracts new textures through his brushstrokes, to visualize the layers of time and space he has discovered while observing cityscapes.

The artist’s viewpoint that focused on architecture and their interiors shifts to the details of cityscapes in his recent works. Heejoon Lee refers to the colors and images of the transforming suburban areas to construct his picture-screen. He examines the aspect of the transformation of the appearance of suburban areas, which are the individual units that constitute a cityscape as well as the most intimate link to the people’s lives. The series presented in this exhibition, A Shape of Taste (2018), are the outcome of the reconstitution of the sceneries from Hongik University district, Yeonnam-dong, Hannam-dong, etc. Lee especially focused on the areas that went through rapid transformation from suburban to cultural center areas. This is Lee’s attempt to capture the aesthetics of the modern city by examining the surface skin of the suburban area that transforms in accordance to the times and purposes. The artist’s contemplation on the aspect of the change in aesthetic choices depending on lifestyles is noticeable.

Heejoon Lee was born in Seoul, 1988. He graduated from Hongik University with a Bachelor’s degree in Painting and Sculpture in 2012, and received his Master’s degree in Fine Arts at Glasgow School of Art in 2014. He has held solo exhibitions at institutions such as Yeemock Gallery (Seoul), Kigoja (Seoul), and Weekend (Seoul). He has participated in group exhibitions at institutions such as Akureyri Art Museum (Akureyri, Iceland), Grace and Clark Fyfe Gallery (Glasgow, U.K.), Occupy My Time Gallery (London), and more. He also administered a new exhibition space, ‘No Toilet’ (2014-2015) and presented multiple exhibitions. He has been a participant in Neoterismoi Toumazou (Nicosia, Cyprus) residency, and his work is included in the public collection of Art Bank, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Gwacheon, Korea). He is currently living and working in Seoul.