Spotlight: Yewon Lee, 'A Note for the Forgotten Ones'

Tell us about this project:

"This project explores the fluidity of identity and the reconstruction of visual language through painting on Hanji. After many years of studying traditional Korean painting in Seoul, I continued my training in London, where my direction shifted as I was confronted with new cultural and visual environments. The dissonance and unfamiliarity I experienced between these two contexts encouraged me to think of identity not as a fixed position but as something unfolding across overlapping times and spaces. This perspective allows my work to exist in an open state, never fully settled, always moving between boundaries.

"I use Hanji as my primary surface, working with ink, pigment, pastel, and pencil. The process begins with collage on Hanji, which I construct without a predetermined plan. This first layer is guided by intuition and unconscious response rather than conscious design. Unexpected spaces, fragments, and flows emerge from this stage, reflecting my inner state and setting the atmosphere of the work. In the next stage, I introduce figurative elements with greater structure, considering their symbolic meaning and spatial relationship. Finally, in applying color, I return again to intuition and improvisation, allowing figures to respond to one another and create subtle tensions within the composition. This balance of unconscious layering, structural planning, and intuitive colour defines the working method of my paintings.

"Individual works extend these concerns in different directions. Dancing shadow of forgotten tales deconstructs and reconfigures motifs from myths and folktales, leaving them as shadows that drift across layered surfaces. The paths of wandering souls reflects on beings without centre or destination, using collage and the materiality of Hanji to visualize dispersion and incompleteness. Where lazy unicorns march imagines creatures existing at the threshold between reality and fantasy, using playful colour and organic form to suggest identities that move at their own rhythm. When shadows tell their secrets focuses on visualising emotions and unconscious states that resist language, presenting silhouettes and traces as a way of evoking unspoken narratives.

"Across these works, my project unfolds at the intersection of tradition and contemporaneity, East and West, personal memory and shared imagination. I do not view painting as a fixed conclusion, but as a temporary state within the continuous process of identity - formed, blurred, and re-layered over time. My work aims not to deliver a single message, but to offer an open space where viewers can sense and reconfigure meaning for themselves within the flow of images".

Tell us about your practice:

"The main purpose of my work is to continually redefine and examine my identity at each moment. It is not a static settlement but an accumulation of lived records that keep shifting in meaning. The enigmatic animals in my work operate as stand-ins for the self: they depict a person who is constantly changing and evolving. Rather than offering a fixed description, my work searches for new - sometimes indescribable - embodiments of the self that emerge from each moment and place.

"I describe myself as a hybrid person. Moving between Seoul and London, I remain the same individual, yet I am read differently depending on social and cultural context. In London, as someone not born here, I am often positioned as an outsider; that experience shapes how I understand myself - not as belonging to a single tradition, but as existing in-between. This position informs my imagery and the way I think about identity as multiple, relative, and continually negotiated.

"Because of this, my references are not limited to East Asia. I draw from myths, folktales, and inherited stories from around the world. The creatures in my work include dragons and tigers; birds influenced by the phoenix or the vermilion bird; ambiguous forms with dinosaur-like bodies or reptilian qualities; and human-like figures that verge on the monstrous. Each carries traces of different cultural lineages, yet on the surface they coexist without hierarchy. By staging these encounters, my work presents identity as a field where diverse origins meet and remain in dialogue - coherent enough to be mine, but open enough to keep changing.

"To me, artwork does not conclude upon exhibition - it continues to evolve, flowing through new perspectives and experiences, encouraging viewers to reconsider how identity and belief systems are constructed and redefined."

Yewon Lee (b.1994 in Seoul, Korea) is an interdisciplinary artist based between London and Seoul. She graduated with her BA and MFA in oriental painting at Seoul National University and MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art.

Yewon Lee's work is a profound exploration of identity, capturing the fluidity and evolution of self through every moment. The enigmatic animals in her artwork symbolize her ever shifting and evolving nature. Rather than a static depiction, Yewon's art is an ongoing exploration of the indescribable embodiments of each moment in time and place.

She has exhibited internationally in London, Milan, Berlin and Seoul amongst others. She was shortlisted for The Gilchrist-Fisher Award, the Sir John Hurt Art Prize and the New Contemporary 2024.