Hailing from Yeongju, artist Keunmin Lee (1982) is known for his paintings and drawings which not only tap into his personal experiences with hallucinations, but are also guided by instinctive gestures. Lee translates hallucinatory visions into visceral compositions characterised by rich red hues and meticulous brushwork. His paintings materialise enduring mental traces, as he engages in a cathartic process that turns the mind inside out. The forms he paints resemble magnified and abstracted fragments of flesh, muscle tissue, and veins, which seem to infuse each canvas with the heat, viscosity and pulsation of vital organs, thus eliciting a synaesthetic experience that approaches the sublime. In his first exhibition at Peres Projects gallery in Berlin, entitled Realizing Boundaries, a new body of work is presented. The thirteen oil paintings unfold tormented cartographies. Networks of nervous lines meander across organic shapes, charting circuitous routes that read as intricate maps of the mind.
The paintings display hover between figuration and abstraction, depicting biomorphic forms that resemble zoomed-in fragments of bodies, organs, veins, or skin. Juxtaposing light and darkness, Lee works with rich palettes dominated by warm hues that are interspersed with icy blues. Varying shades of red saturate the exhibition. An allusion to blood, they serve as metaphorical markers that distinguish the outside world from inner ones. Despite their literal titles, the paintings elude rational grasp, emphasising instead a raw physicality that shifts back and forth between meticulous brushwork and expressive mark making. As scratches, imprints, and fierce brushstrokes activate the surface of the painting Encounter in the Mountains (2023) for instance, figuration dissolves, leaving behind visceral traces of inner struggles made both visible and tangible. This in-betweenness speaks to the origin of Lee’s images—a place where the real and the unreal overlap.
The paintings capture visualisations of pathological experiences and hallucinations that the artist endured in 2001 while hospitalised and diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Rather than rendering straightforward depictions of hallucinatory visions, Lee’s works convey impressionistic memories that weave together the overall feeling, atmosphere and psychological impact of this haunting time, held within the confines of the frame. While working mostly with oil, Lee sometimes welcomes debris and foreign bodies. Inspired by outsider art, Lee draws on the idea of a pure creative act freed from the conventions, references, and expectations of the art world. It’s somehow not surprising that he explores a form of resistance against social structures that categorise and label individuals—socially, medically, economically, emotionally. Mind you, medical diagnosis serves here as a metaphor for the regulating systems that manage and standardize social bodies, reducing them to data for the sake of rationalisation and efficiency (on through Feb 24).
Peres Projects
Karl Marx Allee 82 (Friedrichshain)
10243 Berlin
Telephone +49 30 275950770
Mon-Sat 11am-6pm
Publishers Note
Just to be clear – superfuture® is a design blog and not a political commentator. No surprise there. The scope of our content has always been global and borderless, however that can often mean covering projects in countries where we will not agree with the politics or actions of those countries. In a world that’s as screwed up as ever right now, the focus of our support is to those designers, architects and other creatives who aim to make the world a more liveable one – as opposed to people that try their hardest to destroy it. So if a project hits our desk and we like it based on its design credentials, we may choose to publish regardless of its location or creators nationality. superfuture® has always been inclusive and hopes for all current wars, aggression, violence, hate and extremism to end.
