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Hwayeon Lee’s work begins less with the question of what to paint, and more with how to settle. In a period when emotions felt crowded and unstable, she found herself looking for a steady center—something that could hold her without noise. The sensation she held onto came from Kyoto, from the measured order of a Kare-sansui garden: a space made of stone, gravel, and sand, reduced to essentials, yet capable of bringing surprising calm. Repeated lines, controlled emptiness, and a silence with weight.
Lee carries that structure into her paintings, building a private garden on the surface of the work. Her images don’t plead for attention. They accumulate—slowly. The fiber of hanji, the time held in the hand, the firmness that appears through drying and layering. Over time, that accumulation changes the viewer’s pace too. In front of Hwayeon Lee’s work, the habit of naming things quickly begins to loosen.
A Quiet Origin in Kyoto
What Lee borrows from the garden is not its outward appearance, but its architecture of stability. A Kare-sansui garden is both landscape and abstraction: line, point, and empty space forming relationships that calm the mind. The same principle runs through her paintings. Ornament is stripped away; what remains is allowed to support itself through balance. That’s why her work feels less like a scene to “look at,” and more like a place to stay with. In this sense, quiet in Hwayeon Lee’s practice isn’t a mood—it’s a stance. When anxiety grows louder, she returns to simpler structure, and lets restraint do the work.
72.7 x 50 cm
Order Made by the Hand
Hwayeon Lee works in a deliberately tactile way. She draws measured lines with ruler and compass, then tears hanji by hand and builds the surface piece by piece. The work dries, receives another layer, and dries again—repeatedly. It’s not a process that rushes toward a conclusion. The process is the density. What stays in the painting isn’t a theatrical “expression” of emotion, but the time in which emotion becomes organized. With every small addition, the surface gathers quiet weight. The steadiness you feel in her work is not forced through bold form, but built through accumulated, patient labor.
Jeongon (靜穩): The Mind Settling into Black
Jeongon (靜穩)—a word that points to stillness and calm—is the clearest axis of Lee’s practice. Referencing the structural logic of the Kyoto garden, she doesn’t recreate a view; she composes a sense of quiet through relationships among line, point, and open space.
Here, black is not simply darkness. For Hwayeon Lee, black becomes the most stable ground—an unwavering tone that holds its calm even as other colors approach it. Thoughts can pass through without shaking the surface. That’s why her black feels less heavy than it is steady; less cold than it is sustaining. Slowly, the viewer moves from “reading” the work to simply looking, and that slower looking becomes a way of approaching stillness.
Ocean of stillness, 2024, Hanji and mixed media on panel, 30 x 30 cm
Jeongon Sea and Pause: Between Ripples and Rest
Jeongon Sea begins from a familiar kare-sansui motif: a large stone at the center, with circular lines radiating outward like ripples. In Lee’s translation, the central “island” evokes the self, while the surrounding rings suggest inner waves—subtle movements of thought and feeling. The inner world is not always clear; sometimes it appears faintly, sometimes not at all. Rather than explaining that ambiguity, Lee lets rhythm carry it. The work makes the invisible present without forcing it into a single meaning. Pause is even more restrained, leaving the viewer with a brief stop—a small opening in a crowded day. The composition is simple, yet it holds the gaze. In a culture where stopping can feel like a luxury, Lee treats pause as a first step toward reflection and recovery. The work does not insist, and it does not rush to a conclusion. It leaves you with a quiet question: what inside you is too full, and what needs room to breathe?
If you’d like to see more work, BongHwan Kim:
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