Giving expression to mortality—which sits between the personal and collective, individual and universal, ephemeral and permanent,with subjects ranging from tiny animal figures to a representation of a dreamy universe, in her solo show at Jeeum Gallery artist Yeaji Lee takes the viewer on a journey through the depths of grief and the transformative power of human connection. From Solitude to Solidarity: An Artistic Shift Towards New Spirits is Lee's latest body of work, exploring death and grief while retaining her distinctive style, which is strongly apparent in the entire collection.

Born in 1988 in Seoul, Yeaji Lee earned her Masters from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, CAFA, in Public Art and mural painting. Since then, she has participated in numerous group exhibitions and had solo shows at distinguished galleries and art fairs throughout South-East Asia. The beauty of the desert is alive in the work of artist Yeaji Lee. The Korean-based creative depicts the varied landscapes through striking dreamlike paintings. Featuring bold shapes and vibrant hues, the likes of cacti help each piece communicate the inherent beauty of the desert, along with its vastness that makes it feel so connected and intimate.

The desert is no stranger to the art world: a convenient metaphor for emptiness and desolation, it is the paradigmatic ‘nowhere’, whether secluding classic works of 1960s land art out of reach of consumer society or forming one of Dante Alighieri’s infernal landscapes in Divine Comedy (1308–20). The gradual accumulation of visual experiences referring to deserts adds to the thickness of narratives about these places, which used to be blank screens on which people could project their need to escape.  A distinctive colorist, Yeaji Lee creates within each canvas an atmospheric dreamy cosmos, in which nature, emotion, and psyche take center stage. They oscillate somewhere between fantasy and landscape painting: incandescent shades of green, full and honest purples and pinks, sulfuric yellows, deep blue, and melancholic white produce worlds in which a landscape, its unique memory, and the imagination interact, directed by the eye and the mind. 

In Yeaji Lee’s work, the gaze, insistent and fleeting, melancholy and celebratory, fuses with feeling, envisioned as a suite of emotions, a patchwork of romantic reminiscences and introspections, rapturous exhilaration kindled by the passage of time. In Lee’s canvases, the crescent moon symbolizes the "night" we imagine ourselves to be in and the "most dangerous and quiet time" between the desert and the outside world. It is perched on the crest of an impossibly barren landscape that can only be imagined. Moonlight and cactus offer animals a refuge where they can feel shielded and safe. A bunny staring into the mirror is seen in one of the paintings.  Lee was able to capture a variety of emotions in her paintings, such as the small animal's cramped solitude as it sits in sadness. In works like After the love is gone (2023) the tenacious green cactus, a representation of fresh beginning and the power of love, emerges amid the emotional landscape. It persists in the face of aridity as a testament to the enduring power of connection and the dazzling beauty that can be found in even the most challenging circumstances. Animals are tucked together in cactuses whilst looking at bonfires, the moon, and enjoying a meteor shower. Gila woodpeckers, owls, and desert cottontails are all utilized as metaphors for life to illustrate how our planet and our lives are constantly transforming. Thriving in a desolate environment, showing some similarities to the human condition, these tiny creatures have many different meanings in Lee’s paintings; they live in the cacti that have such a beautiful and modern shape and represent the ultimate survivor. The artist continues to create works that comfort everyone's tired minds through peaceful scenes in which various creatures find rest. A celebration of life's beautiful moments, the tenacity of the human spirit, and the transformation from pain to love are the main aspects of her latest body of work. In the center of many of Yeaji Lee's canvases, like for instance in Hunters of Stars (2023), Stay with me (2023) and Last summer whisper(2023) floats the ‘heart island’, a heart-shaped island whose soft, fluffy fur soothes the environment's vastness and where the animals seem to be living a secret life. No specific place, then, and no specific time. Except, arguably, the present. The present because these paintings don’t so much exist as happen while they’re seen, and because—again—what does it mean to paint unabashedly elatedly, in 2023? The world, in so many ways, is not a joyous place; it is terrifying across myriad vectors. And yet contemporary art’s typical response to this—its response, arguably, since just after Matisse’s day—has not been to create anything like a sanctuary. There is great validity in that, of course. But that Yeaji Lee is very much not doing so doesn’t make her art escapist; rather she’s staking out a position that, in the face of great disquiet that shades into hopelessness, art can still be a place to recharge oneself. These paintings, with their superheated opticality, somersaulting spatiality and abundant color, similarly don’t exist as an escape from the world as it is. It’s because the world is how it is that such paintings need to exist, presenting an art of joy and presentness as a radical proposal.