AhHyeon Lee

Artist Note My studio has long been rooted in Junggu. On the way there, construction sites, vacant lots after demolition, and temporary tarps and partition walls appear again and again. At first, I did not think these scenes were connected to my work. They were simply views I passed every day. Yet the longer I continued working, the more those scenes lingered in my mind, longer than anything on the canvas. I first thought it was about form. The cross-sections of cut structures, the planes made by tarps, the texture and unevenness of soil all seemed to echo the relationships between line and plane I was working with on canvas. But that sense could not be explained by resemblance alone. The time during construction stayed with me longer than the finished building, and a vacant lot felt less like an empty place than a site where multiple times and movements had layered and settled. What had already passed and what had yet to be built coexisted, and the state of not being easily resolved into one thing or another kept going. Looking back, something similar was happening in my work. The canvas did not move only in the direction I planned. One line called the next, and each layer of paint covered the traces beneath without fully erasing them. Erasure became space for another kind of intervention. Past choices did not disappear but instead brought future ones, and the canvas kept shifting its relationships, producing different states. Through this process, I came to feel that my practice might be less about completing an image than about creating conditions in which the canvas can keep moving. Around this time, my attitude toward painting began to shift. The canvas became less a structure closing toward a result than a place where multiple times, movements, and choices continue to act on one another. I understand this movement as a verbal attitude in painting. To be verbal, I think, is not to make process visible, but to hold open the possibility that the canvas will not settle into a single state and will keep forming new relationships. Recently, I have been thinking about this alongside the materiality of space. A construction tarp conceals the interior while revealing that change is underway. A vacant lot exists as a moment of pause, already holding the shape of what comes next. I have been thinking for a long time about what kind of structure the sense of transition I noticed there might leave inside painting. My recent work is in the process of holding onto that question and moving, slowly, through it.