I.

“A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.”¹

II.

In 1984 Jinju Lee was playing in a field near her home in Busan, Korea, when a man attempted to force-feed her a peculiar red-and-black fruit. She escaped, managing by force of will, or fate, or luck, to avoid the horrors of unnameable violence. And to this day, she cannot look at that fruit without being overwhelmed by terror. For a time, she succeeded in burying the memory, until a series of isolated events conspired to dredge it back up, undigested, and unresolved. Some two decades later Lee was studying at Hongik University in Seoul when someone she knew was stabbed to death by a stranger. Soon after, a friend was mugged; another, sexually assaulted. Then an intruder broke into her apartment. On another occasion she awoke to find her room filled with smoke. More time passed, and she found herself in the countryside with her then partner and now husband, the artist Jeongbae Lee, when in that oddly familiar rural landscape the earlier recollection of her near abduction came flooding back. 

Lee has referred to this childhood experience as a “prototype,” something that continues to haunt her, to exert a mythical influence, a force, even, on her psyche, and, above all, on her paintings. The collapsing of time created by that singular event remains hidden under layers of nebulous recollection: a memory of a memory of a memory, a facsimile of old trauma, destined to repeat itself before the inevitable void of forgetting. And it is here, somewhere between memory and oblivion, that imagination is born. The French psychologist Pierre Janet even proposed that we should think of memory not as a record of the past but as something more dynamic: “the action of telling a story.” 

III.

To tell this story then, and others like it, Lee first had to mine the structure of her own memory. She began by studying the works of the European psychoanalysts Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, as well as the experimental fiction of Marcel Proust, in particular his monumental novel In Search of Lost Time (1906–22) in which a tea-soaked madeleine triggers in the narrator a long-dormant memory. Lee instinctively realized that it was through her art, and specifically her painting, that she could dismantle, scrutinize, and then reassemble not only this singular event in time but potentially all times leading up to the present. Her paintings would in essence be a conduit for recognition and not, as she has stressed in interviews, a form of therapy or catharsis. In other words, it was out of a self-professed curiosity that she has created many of her most unsettling works. Yet her richly detailed, highly choreographed paintings have become something of a paradox: personal and universal deconstructions of her own life as well as explorations into that gray zone that exists between the known and the unknown, the conscious and the unconscious mind. 

It would be strange not to concede that a number of Lee’s works—including A Shy Nightmare (2008): a young woman naked from the waist down, tights pulled down to her ankles, kneeling on grass with a puddle of tears gathers around her neck, her wrist, severed and bandaged, on which sits a dragonfly, while a conch emerges from her right eye; or Full Blossom (2009), which depicts a crying baby in a sink filled with water and a leafless tree in a single-walled, flooded bathroom floating in a non-space—contain elements of Surrealism. That is, familiar objects out of place and out of context; the impossibility of physical space or perspective. But Lee remains adamant that she is not a Surrealist painter. She merely wants to represent “practical reality” as she sees it. Neither is she a painter of dreams, echoing the late American painter Adolph Gottlieb who remarked how the Surrealists had “asserted their belief in subject matter, but to us it was not enough to simply illustrate dreams.” And if, as many believe, the world has no objective appearance to speak of and that our visual and cognitive perception of the world is extraordinarily narrow (after all, we see just five percent of all existing light as our eyes are sensitive only to the segment of the spectrum located between red and violet) then it is not all that surprising that Lee’s paintings, or more precisely their intricate mise-en-scène, are so carefully crafted and populated with objects and details that are as uncanny as they are familiar. And herein lies the strength of her works: they manage to be threatening and discomforting as well as tender and sensual, exhibiting the myriad complexities and contradictions of our lives. In a short text accompanying “Goodbye to Love” (2023), a group exhibition in the Dutch city of Maastricht, Lee expanded on this when she wrote that she had been thinking about “something beyond language, something that cannot be spoken but can be shared, something about latent existences that cannot be articulated.”

IV.

Many of the early paintings bear the hallmarks of an artist wrestling with the vagaries of memory, what Proust described as “a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes a dangerous poison.” Take, for example, A Pretty Silence (2008). Here we see the face of a young woman rendered almost like a Greek mask (or is it a death mask?)—no hair, forehead cut off above the brow and ears. Her eyes are closed, her mouth covered with what looks like a small double-sided floral-patterned cloth nailed, bloodlessly, to her upper lip. The background is plain, the figurative technique realistic though flat, unadorned, inexpressive. Not much in the way of light or shadow; no contrast, minimal texture. Here is someone who appears unable or unwilling to speak. Silenced from without, or from within. And then there is Mourn for a Dress (2008). Again, the evocation of loss and of death. This time a significant element that will reoccur with even greater force and magnitude a decade or so later: a plain black background, signifying the abyss of our minds. On top of this floats (or should it be crumples?) a floral-patterned dress.

Despite a willingness to discuss the past, Lee is reticent to reveal the meanings behind most, if not all, of her works. Besides, many of them are imbued with such attention to detail that any symbolism would be nigh on impossible to parse or deconstruct without getting caught in a kind of Gordian Knot. She has previously hinted at the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster in which more than 300 passengers drowned, relations with North Korea, and the civil war in Syria as public events that percolate throughout her work. But philosophically speaking she wants viewers to infuse their own ideas into her pictures. She even once told the critic and curator Moonjung Lee that “the bigger the gap is, the more room there is for interpretation. If it’s too direct, then that becomes the only way of reading it. With the gaps, I’m trying to provide room for a lot of involvement by the viewer’s own subjectivity.” In short, Lee wants us to create our own story, even to “misread” her work. After all, the world is a confusing place, illogical, and, for the most part, unexplainable. Lee’s works only seek to mirror, to represent this rupture in the illusion of chronology, of linear time, of things connecting or making sense.

There is also the latent and undeniable threat of violence in many of her paintings, what the Korean art critic and academic Chung Yeonshim has described as a “subtle undercurrent,” ready to consume and to terrorize. There is also a quiet uncanniness to her images: an absence where there should be a presence, a presence where there should be an absence, as the late British theorist Mark Fisher explored in his 2016 book The Weird and the Eerie. Elements are what we might describe as wrong. Rewind (2008–09) is a concrete example: a three-sided stage set or studio (the walls are held up by wire, and what looks to be a set of microphones hangs in the center), in which a woman holds a small faceless child into which she inserts a blue hose. There is a fountain to her right; to her left, a bare tree, uprooted and bound at the bottom with rope. A loudspeaker hangs ominously in the top corner and again, a pair of pliers. The scene is out of place and out of time, and yet somehow everything is in its right place. In cinematic terms (a medium with which I would argue Lee shares an affinity), it might be what the French filmmaker Robert Bresson described as bringing together “things that . . . did not seem predisposed to be so”; but, somewhat perversely, there is also no doubt that they have in fact always belonged together. We see the domestic alongside the terrestrial, the mundane alongside the extraordinary: pliers, string, rope, fruit, chairs, studio lights, hose pipes, pencils, crumpled paper, smoke, laundry lines, sheets, vacuum cleaners, plants, hands, branches, and, most often, a single recurring character, who we can only assume is Lee, often half-nude, often wearing sheer black tights (she likes their symbolism—strong yet fragile—and their texture when painted). 

As time passed, Lee began to work on larger, more detailed tableaux, many of which began to depict intricate landscapes rather than isolated set-ups removed from any geographic or topographic context. Large paintings (some of Lee’s are up to six meters wide) can seem grandiose, even pompous. But they are also a way of being intimate, of having a relationship to the body. To paint small pictures, the American painter Mark Rothko believed, is to place yourself outside of your own experience. With larger canvases you are inside. They are not something you command. And Lee constantly stretches the limits of what we understand physical space to be. Fathom (2014) is one of her more maximalist and exhaustive works. Two-and-a-half meters wide, it depicts a temporary structure made out of tarpaulin; a leafless tree, collapsed in the center; a woman, nude from the waist up, wearing only tights, cracking an egg, standing on a scale, with a black plastic bag over her head. Elsewhere, bags on hooks, chairs stacked one on top of the other, a pair of bare feet (belonging to a man?) poking out from behind the tarpaulin, a bucket of paint with a statue of the Virgin Mary inside, a red suitcase ejecting trash bags; the ground strewn with tires, string, rocks. And on it goes. Detritus and junk that might mean something, or nothing. Is Lee referencing copulation and birth, a great change in the central figure’s life, or is it, once again, simply the flotsam of the painter’s mind, the vestiges of images stored and recalled, crammed into a scene that bares all the vestiges of catastrophe? Are these objects loaded with specific meaning for Lee or are they simply everyday things that float through her subconscious, only to be recast in pictorial form? Certainly what we are left with is a plethora of signs and symbols: the clash between the tawdry and the sublime, the softness of nature pushed up against the hardness of manufactured objects offers a remarkably effective example of objects that carry certain associations or psychic weight. They are, in a sense, both metaphorical and literal, nonsensical, and very much of this world. They are landscapes of the mind, or what me might even describe as psycholandscapes.

A few years later Lee painted A Frail Hymn (2017), which displays a more defined sense of composition and technique. This time, a couple, one of whom looks directly out of frame, embrace on the ground beneath a white sheet on top of which sleeps a large sow. Surrounding the couple, dismembered trees, and behind them, a group of ten figures stand, backs turned, heads bowed, all dressed in black, like mourners at a funeral. This attempt to find a semblance of order is often repeated in many of her smaller works, such as Count to Five (2019), in which the ubiquitous female figure carries her own double on her shoulders, though facing toward her so that her face is buried in her crotch. The woman who is being supported holds the branches of a pine tree, the base of which is covered with what looks like a wasp’s nest. Both women are balanced on a small platform held up by rocks and sticks, on top of which is an onion, while underneath lies a single dress shoe. The scene unfolds in a void, a nowhere space where dreams, fantasies, and memories play out, and out of which questions, rather than answers, emerge. 

Jinju Lee has referred to her childhood experience as a “prototype” that continues to haunt her. 

V.

Undoubtedly, Lee’s works are the result of a singular mind and imagination, but seldom do artists operate in a vacuum. Consciously or not, they are indebted to those who have come before. Lee has directly cited the influence of Frida Kahlo and Egon Schiele—the first, it would seem, for her bold representation of the self amid scenes of disparate signs and symbols; the latter for the flatness of form and the expression of inner worlds over external realities (not to mention an obsession with half-nude women in stockings). Looking further back, one can see shades of the Italian Renaissance painter Fra Angelico, especially the disembodied hands in The Mocking of Christ (1440), or for his foreshortened sense of perspective and physical space; or Michelangelo’s studies and sketches of hands and faces, often combined with out-of-place objects through which (dis)connections manifest; or the accursed darkness of the Spanish painter Jusepe de Ribera, especially in Lee’s unnerving Black Paintings (2017– ). Some critics have alluded to the sublime landscapes of the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, but Lee’s landscapes are more enclosed and claustrophobic, unmapped even, without the same monumental sense of awe and wonder. 

When it comes to the direct influence of Korean art on Lee’s practice, much of it derives from the Confucian-inspired era of Joseon portraiture. Throughout this period there was a tradition of meticulously drawing the finest details within the frame, with each individual strand of hair on a person’s body rendered with absolute precision. This is evident in First (2020), in which thin dark hairs are visible on the hand, as well as in the double-sided (Im)possible Scene (2020), in which, on the front side, the faint trace of blue veins can be seen on the neck of the figure whose back is turned to us. And as the years progressed, so did Lee’s attention to detail, driven for the most part by the cumulative development of her painting technique. This is no surprise, seeing as Lee studied oriental painting at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, specifically the traditional Korean chromatic painting technique known as chaesaekhwa, a process in which powdered pigment is mixed with animal-skin glue to create a paint, which is then combined with water. She applied this in some of her earlier works on jangji paper, but since around 2008 she has worked almost exclusively on unbleached cotton cloth. Refining, stretching, and developing this technique further still, Lee began working on her Black Paintings in 2017 in which the same combination of pigment, adhesive, and water on cotton is transfigured using a bespoke black pigment named after her husband who helped develop it. “Handmade JB Black” is a deep, rich matte black that absorbs almost all light, creating an endless negative space. The series began with Hand/Wall (2017), a small painting of a woman’s face obscured by her hands. She floats in the darkness, an abyss, a non-space into which nightmares settle: fragments of images coming in and out of focus, taunting us, forever on our shoulders. In The One Who Knows (2018): two floating hands, one trying to cut the other’s fingers with a pair of scissors. Obligation of Blood (2018): hands again, one sporting a fresh scab, holding, in downward prayer position, a crumpled sheet of yellow legal paper. And finally, two of the most recent works in the series, Visible 8 (2024) and A Well (2024). In the first, the familiar female figure holds up a picture of herself, reminiscent of someone displaying a photo of their deceased or missing loved one; while in the latter, a pair of hands cup a pool of red water (water being, as Lee once described, “the shady and damp side” of her mind). It is one of the purest, most ominous works she has produced to date.

Compared to Lee’s larger, cinematic canvases—especially her monumental The Unperceived (2020), with its triple-sided A-frame structure depicting, on one side, a complex narrative of figures in a large pool of brown water, on the surface of which float chairs, plants (even half a fig, is that the haunted fruit from her past?)—these smaller, darker, controlled works are monadic in their simplicity and costive in their absence of movement, in their heavy repose. It is as if gravity has gone to work on them, applying constant pressure, stripping them of life, of progression, of momentum. All that remains are shards, fragments, glances, moments that are fleeting, symbols that ache with a peculiar melancholy. 

VI.

Intimations of death, or the tragic; sensuality; tension; irony; wit; the ephemeral; and, finally, hope, to make the tragic more bearable: Rothko’s 1958 formula for making art courses throughout Lee’s work, and through acts of transubstantiation the disquiet of her memory surfaces in her paintings and, from there, into your own, disordered mind. Look at her paintings long enough and you will start to see them in your own world, confusing that “reality” with this, as if your retinas have been removed and replaced with hers. It’s all there: in the dishes in your sink, the sheets drying on your roof, the flotsam on the shore outside your window, the pencil on your desk, the clothes on your bedroom floor, the hands that type these words, the face in the mirror, in the black shadows as you lie on your back in the dark, waiting for dawn.

¹Samuel Beckett, Company (London: Calder Publishing, 1979).