Lee Jonghwan《A Round Point Where Stillness Stays》

Lee Jonghwan

Title: A Round Point Where Stillness Stays

2026

Size: 580 × 400 × 38 mm

Medium: Engraving and watercolor on panel, Iron ball

Profile

Lee Jonghwan

1994 Born in Seoul

2024: Completed MFA at the Department of Fine Arts, Korea National University of Arts

2021: Graduated from the Department of Oriental Painting, College of Fine Arts, Seoul National University

Lee Jonghwan (b. 1994) is a contemporary artist based in Seoul.

What characterizes his concept is that he treats painting not as a mere “reproduction of an image” but as a “world in the process of becoming,” where matter, time and perception intersect.

For Lee Jonghwan, painting is defined not as a method for laying an image already formed in the mind onto a support, but as a "world in formation" itself — a world that draws out the possibilities latent in the material and is taking shape at this very moment.

In his work the wood panel on which a painting is made is never merely a support: it is treated as an "organic hexahedron," a "microcosm" inhabited by the beings that have issued from the painting. The grooves and traces of landscape cut into the wood then pass through processes such as casting, producing a texture of his own that moves back and forth across the border between two and three dimensions.

Lee Jonghwan is an artist who continues to expand the materiality of painting, exploring how space, time and human perception come to meet a painting.