Jaeyoun Lee

Jaeyoun Lee’s practice begins with the traces of sensations that persist after an ending. The warmth, anxiety, hurt and intimacy formed through a connection with another do not disappear once that connection comes to an end. Instead, they accumulate in altered forms, continuing to shape who we are in the present. Her paintings emerge from the recognition that both tender and painful sensations can remain active, even when they can no longer be clearly identified or separated.

She builds images through repeated layers of acrylic on wood panel, covering and sanding back the surface. Sanding is not an act of damage applied to a finished painting, but a painterly method of bringing buried colours and traces back into view. Exposed lines, fractures and conflicting layers of colour create a surface in which what has been erased and what remains, past and present, can exist simultaneously. Through painting, she explores the moment when these lingering layers of sensation rise again to the surface.

Aquatic creatures, skin, hands and forest-like environments recur in her work as images of contact between beings with different bodily conditions and conditions of survival. An action understood as warmth or care by one being may become a wound to another. Jaeyoun is interested in how even the wish to share warmth with another can become unstable when the other can never be fully understood on their own terms. Rather than affirming or refusing contact, her paintings remain with the tension between the desire to approach another and the possibility of causing harm.

Her work begins with personal records, past photographs and sketches, which move through processes of digital image generation and editing before becoming paintings. These images are not used as subjects to be reproduced; they are starting points that are covered, abraded and transformed into new surfaces of sensation through painting.

Jaeyoun Lee is a South Korean painter based in Glasgow. She received her BFA in Contemporary Art from Konkuk University and is currently completing her Master of Fine Art at The Glasgow School of Art.