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Lee Hyemin Solo Exhibition. · 2026 · Historical listing

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Information for this edition

Dates
Oct 13, 2026 — Oct 31, 2026
Place
Chung Art Gallery · 4 Samseong-ro 147-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul; 4 Samseong-ro 147-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul
Admission at the time
Free
Facts last checked
2026-10-19
First preserved here
2026-10-22

Published programme

Chung Art Gallery will present a solo exhibition by Lee Hyemin, “a painter who paints longing,” from October 13 to October 31, 2026. Born in 1954, Lee graduated from the Department of Applied Art at Seoul National University and completed coursework in visual design in the university's graduate Department of Industrial Art. Although he dreamed from his youth of life as a full-time artist, he joined a large company after graduating. Even while working there, he never let go of art and continued painting whenever he found time. Building on that accumulated work, he began exhibiting in earnest around the age of 40. He later established a studio in a rural house in Yangpyeong, Gyeonggi-do, where memories of his childhood remain, and has continued his life as a full-time artist. In a space inhabited by childhood memories, he continually summons onto canvas landscapes and people that disappeared long ago and the longing that remains deep in his heart. A girl in a white jeogori jacket and black skirt, her hair tied in pigtails, appears in Lee's paintings. A puppy and chicks are beside her, and a child's scribbles remain on an ocher-colored wall. In spring, azaleas and forsythia bloom, and long shadows beneath warm sunlight recall the time of an afternoon long ago. Yet what the artist wishes to paint is not simply “a girl from the old days.” “I miss that time gone by. It is a time faintly engraved on my body and mind. What I paint is not a girl. It is longing for that past time.” As the artist says, the girl and landscapes in his work do not remain the story of a particular person. They are hometown landscapes that disappeared from beside us amid rapid industrialization and urbanization, a childhood to which we cannot return, and forms of memory remaining in a corner of each person's heart. That is why viewers naturally bring out their own memories before Lee's paintings. For someone, it may be the wall of a rural house where they played as a child; for someone else, a grandmother's house or a mother's youth. For another, it may be a strangely missed spring landscape that they cannot quite remember. The ocher walls, girl, flowers and grasses, puppy and chicks in his works are scenes no longer easy to encounter in reality. Yet disappearance does not mean complete absence. Time folded away in memory shows itself again through the artist's paintings and blossoms like spring flowers. This is precisely why Lee's paintings bring warm resonance and empathy to so many people across generations. Lee's consistently gentle and warm personality also permeates his work. Looking at his paintings, it can sometimes feel that lengthy explanations are unnecessary. Making someone smile, then at another moment moving their heart and bringing tears to their eyes: his work quietly shows the emotion that art can offer the human heart. We hope this exhibition lets many visitors briefly step into the past time Lee has painted, and there encounter again their forgotten childhoods and hometowns, the people they loved, and their precious moments.

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