ARTIST STATEMENT
Jinseok Lee works with organic remnants — straw, gauze, dyed or hand-torn fabric, worn clothing, earth — and with cast bronze.
Both kinds of material come to him in passage, having already moved through a body's time, neither yet finished nor fully gone.
He works at the threshold where a form must decide whether it will collapse or persist, and through that threshold he records what cannot be spoken in any other language.
My work does not explain loss; it carries it. I record the time of loss through matter that endures.
Today the human is asked to prove value through accuracy and efficiency. Where that function is removed, where does the human go? A speed that permits no mourning erases human time.
Loss is not something to be overcome, but something to be borne. Yet this bearing is not the passive duration of pain. The time of bearing is where we touch again what we were before function — beings who tended to one another, who shared warmth.
I transform that time of bearing, and what cannot be undone in us, into matter.
I have long been drawn to certain substances: things transparent yet elastic; things that stretch until they tear, revealing the threads within; things loosened, punctured, but never thrown away.
Faded cloths once used for wiping bodies. Sleeves stretched from long wear. A garment mended in the careful keeping of a household. Pieces that try to shine wherever a thin light still falls.
When these materials came to me, I recognized something familiar in them — they resembled absence. They were what someone had left behind.
I came to think of them as evidence that someone had lived, and as a place where they continued to endure in my memory.
Even when the body was gone, the matter still held its time.
I wanted to recreate flesh from these fragments — to fill them in, to revive them.
My hands moved before my thoughts.
What do we do with things that have loosened and worn thin?
I pick them up.
What I pick up does not need to be held forever — only borne until it can be let go.
At a gravesite, I once saw plastic flowers. They did not wilt, did not change, were eternal. And yet people replaced them often, with new ones. The flowers that had endured looked insufficient. The new ones felt more like sincerity.
The replaced flowers become industrial waste. But we do not simply consume mourning — we consume and summon it at once. The new flower calls back the form of grief, and that form, never resolved, is reshaped and replaced again. Mourning is not dissolved. It is consumed, repeatedly, within the meaning of remembrance.
Before things that have loosened and worn thin, I rest in a different question. Where, and how, do we resemble them? What sensation do we meet in the time of bearing? The materials I work with are not answers to this question. They are the place where the question stays.
I do not approach grief as subject matter. Nor do I keep it in the cycle of replacement that never resolves. I approach grief as something that lives inside matter itself.
What a body has touched, carried, or worn does not simply record use — it retains sensation. What can bend is never broken.
My practice is built on this conviction: matter does not forget, even when we are required to.
I scrape, press, twist, and reweave. I tear, dye, and rejoin.
The labor is durational; each act is both a record of time and a refusal to let time be forgotten.
I do not seek a finalized shape. I take the very threshold — where a form is decided, whether it will hold or collapse — as the condition of my work.
This process of tearing, filling, and rejoining is no different from the act of reconstituting oneself.
Alongside organic remnants, I also work with bronze.
This material entered my practice as a way of carrying the changing time of organic matter into another time — a permanence that is human, an eternity that is ordinary. Not the unchanging promised by industry, but a permanence reached only through bearing.
Where straw, gauze, and worn fabric tear and fall apart, bronze, emerging through fire and a long process, allows what is fragile to be held in another form.
Bronze is one of several ways I ask the same question across materials — how to give weight to fragility itself.
In the gallery, these works occupy space as if they have drifted into it. They lean, settle, gather on the floor like sediment, or hang as if waiting to be claimed.
They carry, in their weight or their thinness, the displacement that produced them — bodies, fabrics, and matter that have moved between places, never fully arriving.
The forms maintain a state of tension, as if about to tear apart.
I think of this as the Critical Point: the threshold neither fully collapsed nor fully sustained.
It is the formal condition I seek to capture, and the existential condition of someone who endures while losing themselves.
The cracks and holes are sites where an invisible internal struggle has erupted onto the surface.
I believe matter remembers.
Even after the body disappears, sensation remains within the material.
The viewer encounters worn layers instead of sleek surfaces; a time of dwelling instead of instant stimulation.
What I seek is not endurance alone.
At the threshold, when the body can no longer hold, something else begins — a quiet floating, a breath returning. The pressure that bound the form becomes weightless.
A time of keeping the eyes closed, still, until the light has passed.
Through the language of enduring matter, I record not only the time of loss, but also the moment when what was held tightly learns, at last, to release itself.
◎ POSITION
My work begins in private loss. But it does not remain there — it opens onto the circuit through which contemporary mourning is consumed and replaced; the circuit in which what has endured comes to seem insufficient, and what is new feels more sincere. I do not approach grief as a theme; I follow the trace grief leaves in matter.
My formal vocabulary — vertical washes of grey, bodies of straw, gauze, and bandages emerging from the surface — belongs to the lineage of postwar German material painting, especially Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys. But I do not speak from their mythic-historical weight. I am not a witness to history. I do not stand where Doris Salcedo testifies to Colombia's disappeared, or where Christian Boltanski preserves the absence the Holocaust left behind. And yet what they have made visible — the body as absence, the trace a departed life leaves in matter — is the deep soil of my own work.
Methodologically, I stand closest to Eva Hesse: the place where materials do not represent the body but behave as the body behaves. Gauze stretches until it reveals its inner threads. Straw stiffens yet remains brittle. Bandages carry the memory of contact without naming it. These movements belong to what Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss called the informe — the threshold where form is not yet, or no longer, fully held; where matter endures.
Born in Korea, working in Germany, my double position is not incidental to this work but its structural condition. East Asian restraint and Western materiality, two vocabularies of mourning — within my work, one is not the alibi of the other. The crossing itself is the place where I stand.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Jinseok Lee works with organic remnants — straw, gauze, dyed or hand-torn fabric, worn clothing, earth — and with cast bronze.
Both kinds of material come to him in passage, having already moved through a body's time, neither yet finished nor fully gone.
He works at the threshold where a form must decide whether it will collapse or persist, and through that threshold he records what cannot be spoken in any other language.
My work does not explain loss; it carries it. I record the time of loss through matter that endures.
Today the human is asked to prove value through accuracy and efficiency. Where that function is removed, where does the human go? A speed that permits no mourning erases human time.
Loss is not something to be overcome, but something to be borne. Yet this bearing is not the passive duration of pain. The time of bearing is where we touch again what we were before function — beings who tended to one another, who shared warmth.
I transform that time of bearing, and what cannot be undone in us, into matter.
I have long been drawn to certain substances: things transparent yet elastic; things that stretch until they tear, revealing the threads within; things loosened, punctured, but never thrown away.
Faded cloths once used for wiping bodies. Sleeves stretched from long wear. A garment mended in the careful keeping of a household. Pieces that try to shine wherever a thin light still falls.
When these materials came to me, I recognized something familiar in them — they resembled absence. They were what someone had left behind.
I came to think of them as evidence that someone had lived, and as a place where they continued to endure in my memory.
Even when the body was gone, the matter still held its time.
I wanted to recreate flesh from these fragments — to fill them in, to revive them.
My hands moved before my thoughts.
What do we do with things that have loosened and worn thin?
I pick them up.
What I pick up does not need to be held forever — only borne until it can be let go.
At a gravesite, I once saw plastic flowers. They did not wilt, did not change, were eternal. And yet people replaced them often, with new ones. The flowers that had endured looked insufficient. The new ones felt more like sincerity.
The replaced flowers become industrial waste. But we do not simply consume mourning — we consume and summon it at once. The new flower calls back the form of grief, and that form, never resolved, is reshaped and replaced again. Mourning is not dissolved. It is consumed, repeatedly, within the meaning of remembrance.
Before things that have loosened and worn thin, I rest in a different question. Where, and how, do we resemble them? What sensation do we meet in the time of bearing? The materials I work with are not answers to this question. They are the place where the question stays.
I do not approach grief as subject matter. Nor do I keep it in the cycle of replacement that never resolves. I approach grief as something that lives inside matter itself.
What a body has touched, carried, or worn does not simply record use — it retains sensation. What can bend is never broken.
My practice is built on this conviction: matter does not forget, even when we are required to.
I scrape, press, twist, and reweave. I tear, dye, and rejoin.
The labor is durational; each act is both a record of time and a refusal to let time be forgotten.
I do not seek a finalized shape. I take the very threshold — where a form is decided, whether it will hold or collapse — as the condition of my work.
This process of tearing, filling, and rejoining is no different from the act of reconstituting oneself.
Alongside organic remnants, I also work with bronze.
This material entered my practice as a way of carrying the changing time of organic matter into another time — a permanence that is human, an eternity that is ordinary. Not the unchanging promised by industry, but a permanence reached only through bearing.
Where straw, gauze, and worn fabric tear and fall apart, bronze, emerging through fire and a long process, allows what is fragile to be held in another form.
Bronze is one of several ways I ask the same question across materials — how to give weight to fragility itself.
In the gallery, these works occupy space as if they have drifted into it. They lean, settle, gather on the floor like sediment, or hang as if waiting to be claimed.
They carry, in their weight or their thinness, the displacement that produced them — bodies, fabrics, and matter that have moved between places, never fully arriving.
The forms maintain a state of tension, as if about to tear apart.
I think of this as the Critical Point: the threshold neither fully collapsed nor fully sustained.
It is the formal condition I seek to capture, and the existential condition of someone who endures while losing themselves.
The cracks and holes are sites where an invisible internal struggle has erupted onto the surface.
I believe matter remembers.
Even after the body disappears, sensation remains within the material.
The viewer encounters worn layers instead of sleek surfaces; a time of dwelling instead of instant stimulation.
What I seek is not endurance alone.
At the threshold, when the body can no longer hold, something else begins — a quiet floating, a breath returning. The pressure that bound the form becomes weightless.
A time of keeping the eyes closed, still, until the light has passed.
Through the language of enduring matter, I record not only the time of loss, but also the moment when what was held tightly learns, at last, to release itself.
◎ POSITION
My work begins in private loss. But it does not remain there — it opens onto the circuit through which contemporary mourning is consumed and replaced; the circuit in which what has endured comes to seem insufficient, and what is new feels more sincere. I do not approach grief as a theme; I follow the trace grief leaves in matter.
My formal vocabulary — vertical washes of grey, bodies of straw, gauze, and bandages emerging from the surface — belongs to the lineage of postwar German material painting, especially Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys. But I do not speak from their mythic-historical weight. I am not a witness to history. I do not stand where Doris Salcedo testifies to Colombia's disappeared, or where Christian Boltanski preserves the absence the Holocaust left behind. And yet what they have made visible — the body as absence, the trace a departed life leaves in matter — is the deep soil of my own work.
Methodologically, I stand closest to Eva Hesse: the place where materials do not represent the body but behave as the body behaves. Gauze stretches until it reveals its inner threads. Straw stiffens yet remains brittle. Bandages carry the memory of contact without naming it. These movements belong to what Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss called the informe — the threshold where form is not yet, or no longer, fully held; where matter endures.
Born in Korea, working in Germany, my double position is not incidental to this work but its structural condition. East Asian restraint and Western materiality, two vocabularies of mourning — within my work, one is not the alibi of the other. The crossing itself is the place where I stand.
ARTIST STATEMENT