Exhibition Information

Dinner at Ryokan
2019 acrylic on photocollage 73 x 73cm

Coffee Farm
2019 acrylic on photocollage 73 x 73cm

Omakase
2019 acrylic on photocollage 73 x 73cm

Nikko Hotel
2019 acrylic on photocollage 73 x 73cm

			l’espace71 is pleased to announce Heejoon Lee’s solo exhibition The Tourist, which shows exploration of abstract painting and its media possibilities in Lee’s own formative language. This is Heejoon Lee’s first solo exhibition at l’espace71, and will showcase about 15 new works that render the special aspects of today's experiences in a pictorial language. Lee has worked to create a two-dimensional environment by collecting and reconstructing the formative elements in the images and interior/exterior environment of urban architecture. The works for this exhibition are composed of layers of photo collage, which is a new try for the artist, and pictorial images, describing the dimension of experiences created by interlocking the recent digital environment with cognitive perception. l’espace71 expects viewers to bring their own experiences in touch with the surface of the painting in this exhibition.   
The keyword of Heejoon Lee’s body of works is ‘perceptual experience’. Since 2015, when he returned from studying abroad, Lee has continued a kind of ‘tour’ to see the urban landscape from the perspective of a stranger. This is to see the bare face of the urban experience that is often unperceived and overlooked in the routine of everyday life. Through the 2016 series of Interior nor Exterior, the artist has led viewers to discover new meanings behind the scenes that are not exposed on the surface of the everyday life in the city. Through continuous pictorial experiments on perception and experience, he released in 2019 A Shape of Taste, his most recent work, in which he showed an exploration of the changes that the digital experience in today’s society brings to perception through the process of cropping and editing images he discovered in cities. In terms of an extension of this exploration, Heejoon Lee tries to reveal in this exhibition a more concrete sense of the phenomenon that digital images occupy a large part of our experience in general. 
   Heejoon Lee started The Tourist series with an interest in the impact of digital consumption of images in travel destinations on our experience. Taking pictures on smartphones in travel destinations and posting them on social media are a ubiquitous phenomenon in our century. Lee has been working on the images captured by on-the-spot perception, and as an extension of this, he notes the ubiquitous phenomenon. For him, the process of printing out the smartphone pictures taken in travel spots and arranging them in the form of photo collage on the canvas is to reveal the difference between the traces left by a technical object and the actual experiences, that is, to reveal the different texture of memories kept by the two. Therefore, the artist tries to recall the experiences of the past onto the canvas by bringing in the possibilities of geometric abstraction and hard-edge images, thereby he aims to generate layers of diverse meanings.
      Heejoon Lee wonders whether the expansion of the field of social communication by means of smartphones, cameras, and social media would lead to a reduction in experience or to a transition to another dimension of experience. In general, an experience has some cognitive dimension through perception, but since digital images have infiltrated into the contemporary realm of experience, one comes to ask what kind of possibility we should expect in this situation. According to Gilbert Simondon, humans and mechanical objects are entities that engage with each other and coexist, regardless of their being placed in the domination-subordination structure. In this context, the operation of digital images surrounding our daily lives reveals the process of the dynamic changes in the topography of our world. In other words, the digital images surrounding our perception become part of an environment that has the possibility of giving birth to a new world in conjunction with our perceptual experience. Going through his ambivalence towards contemporary experiences, the artist tries to create an interface between the emotional dimension of each of viewers and the pictorial messages in the midst of a rapid change.

      Heejoon Lee(b.1988) lives and works in Seoul. He received BFA in painting and sculpture at Hong-Ik University in 2012 and MFA degree at Glasgow School of Art in 2014. He has held solo exhibition including The Tourist (l’espace71, 2020), Aa (Gallery Su, 2019), The Speakers (Weekend, 2017), Emerald Skin (Yeemock Gallery, 2017), Interior nor Exterior: Prototype (Kigoja, 2016). Recent group show has been held at Amorepacific Museum(Jeju, 2019), Seoul Museum of Art(Seoul, 2019), Sehwa Museum of Art(Seoul, 2019), Museum San(Wonju, 2019), Hakgojae Gallery(Seoul, 2018), and etc. He was nominated in 'Jury Picks' in the publication 100 Painters of Tomorrow (Thames & Hudson 2014) and the New Sensation 2014 by Saatchi Gallery. His works are included in the collection of major art institutions, such as Seoul Museum of Art and National Museum of Contemporary Art.