Hyejin Lee

I draw my emotions from the experiences. I’ve also taught children about various materials and technics. As an artist, I want to draw artworks that general people feel comfortable and enjoyable. I like my work titled ‘breakup’ at most because it shows the way I should go in my art career.

I've paintings in three big categories until now:

<Empty house> 
It’s a series of paintings which shows the emotions of a teenage girl from a single parent family.  
The representative work, ‘breakup’, shows various broken emotions of the girl from the divorce of the parents.

<The Map-Walk through the memories without name > 
Walk through the memories without name shows the emotional changes in the artist’s repetitive daily lives. 

The artist expresses the emotional changes in the daily life through the paintings and repeats the process of accumulating materials and cutting them. He draws the subject, grind it with sandpaper, wipe it with wet tissue and draw it again with the paints. The artist also repeats this process like our routines from the morning to the night. By repeating this, we can see slight changes in the images, and the artist draws oneself by repeating the process.  

<Food Socks>
The "Food Socks" series is a group of pictures where food ingredients are completely stuffed into character socks.

The ingredients represent the parent's interests and love for their children, while the socks figuratively illustrate a growing child .

 While we prepare and cook ingredients as a delicious meal, in the picture, these ingredients are stuffed raw into the socks to the point of nearly bursting at the seams. Each pair of socks show different faces and expressions, depending on the ingredients in the socks. The socks are seen as ridiculous figures, reflecting our own absurdities.

 A variety of characters with wacky expressions are printed on the ingredient-filled socks.  These represent caricatures, such as the disappointing experience of not receiving a gift from Santa Claus on Christmas, which tells us this isn't really a gift.  

 'Eat' is the most basic and essential act of life. To eat one meal, one has to follow a process. One process is that of cooking. The other is that of tasting. With the "Food Socks", I want to contrast parents' feeling of concern and love for their children with the children's feeling of growth and learning . These images on the socks full of ingredients are caricatures of parent's excessive love for their children, which may become misguided and lead to unexpected consequences. 

Due to my studies, I lived apart from my family, and I struggled mentally and physically. At that time, my parents cooked for me. From this, I could regain not only my health but also my relationship with my family. Based on my experiences, I started this food series.  At first, I thought people eat to live. So initially the food series expressed the act of eating as a brutal struggle for survival. As I went through this process, I then began to think that while humans eat to live, they also want to eat better tasting food. That's a basic human desire. Therefore, through this exhibition, I hope that we reflect on and appreciate the three meals a day that we can enjoy. 

Painting - Mixed media, Oil, Acrylic, and Drawing

2014  CAU, Korean Painting, Master degree
2009  CAU, School of Fine Art, Korean Painting, Bachelor degree