Jin Han Lee: Whispers
To celebrate the opening of its New York Project Space, Gallery Hyundai presents Whispers, a solo exhibition of Jin Han Lee, from May 6 to June 7, 2025. Dividing her time between Seoul and London, Lee captures “untranslatable” moments that only painting can articulate, emerging from fissures between individuals and language, different cultures, and artworks—and arranges them on canvas like tracing the contours of a dream. Following the success of her first solo exhibition at Gallery Hyundai in Seoul in 2024, Lee’s return to New York encapsulates her inclusive vision of painting, which visualizes the most personal and internal experiences in pursuit of the possibility of universal communication beyond structured language.
Whispers transmits the soft caress on layers of emotion, memory, and sensations that characterizes Lee’s practice, in the form of subtle whispers echoing off her canvas. This exhibition encompasses her early works inspired by specific episodes during her time in the UK as well as recent works that feature recurring motifs such as the sun and moon, flower, feet, and trees, foregrounding the “minute sensibilities” that cut across Lee’s oeuvre. The surreal landscapes and ecosystems of metaphors in Lee’s paintings have their own way of surely but quietly permeating the viewer’s senses. Notably in her recent works, motifs densely accumulate and organically intertwine into a ceaselessly metastasizing chain of associations, symbols, metaphors, and substitutions.
These plural movements across Lee’s imagery are articulated through her distinctive brushwork that “pulls” rather than “pushes”—she developed the technique during a VR (virtual reality) residency in 2021 where she experimented with brushstrokes resembling East Asian calligraphy, culminating in a redefinition of three-dimensionality in painting. In doing so, she approached new media environments not as independent territories but as avenue to reawaken her own calligraphic sensibility, and in turn, to broaden her continuing mission to give sensible form to cultural nuances. Lee continues to favor compositions that pull the surface forward, an extension of her ongoing experimentation on pictorial space and the status of painting within contemporaneous conditions since early works. For example, she often employs curtains as compositional tools, leaving the center of the canvas vacant while aggregating detailed depictions, thick layers, and richly decorative linear elements along the edges. This compositional strategy boldly inverts lineal perspective by assigning weight and depth to the edges, in turn generating an inward pull that makes her work tangibly compelling. Furthermore, the contrast between dense edges and simplified color fields at the center recalls vestiges of time and memory and the dynamics of presence and absence.
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To celebrate the opening of its New York Project Space, Gallery Hyundai presents Whispers, a solo exhibition of Jin Han Lee, from May 6 to June 7, 2025. Dividing her time between Seoul and London, Lee captures “untranslatable” moments that only painting can articulate, emerging from fissures between individuals and language, different cultures, and artworks—and arranges them on canvas like tracing the contours of a dream. Following the success of her first solo exhibition at Gallery Hyundai in Seoul in 2024, Lee’s return to New York encapsulates her inclusive vision of painting, which visualizes the most personal and internal experiences in pursuit of the possibility of universal communication beyond structured language.
Whispers transmits the soft caress on layers of emotion, memory, and sensations that characterizes Lee’s practice, in the form of subtle whispers echoing off her canvas. This exhibition encompasses her early works inspired by specific episodes during her time in the UK as well as recent works that feature recurring motifs such as the sun and moon, flower, feet, and trees, foregrounding the “minute sensibilities” that cut across Lee’s oeuvre. The surreal landscapes and ecosystems of metaphors in Lee’s paintings have their own way of surely but quietly permeating the viewer’s senses. Notably in her recent works, motifs densely accumulate and organically intertwine into a ceaselessly metastasizing chain of associations, symbols, metaphors, and substitutions.
These plural movements across Lee’s imagery are articulated through her distinctive brushwork that “pulls” rather than “pushes”—she developed the technique during a VR (virtual reality) residency in 2021 where she experimented with brushstrokes resembling East Asian calligraphy, culminating in a redefinition of three-dimensionality in painting. In doing so, she approached new media environments not as independent territories but as avenue to reawaken her own calligraphic sensibility, and in turn, to broaden her continuing mission to give sensible form to cultural nuances. Lee continues to favor compositions that pull the surface forward, an extension of her ongoing experimentation on pictorial space and the status of painting within contemporaneous conditions since early works. For example, she often employs curtains as compositional tools, leaving the center of the canvas vacant while aggregating detailed depictions, thick layers, and richly decorative linear elements along the edges. This compositional strategy boldly inverts lineal perspective by assigning weight and depth to the edges, in turn generating an inward pull that makes her work tangibly compelling. Furthermore, the contrast between dense edges and simplified color fields at the center recalls vestiges of time and memory and the dynamics of presence and absence.
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