Jeewi Lee
born 1987 Seoul, South Korea
lives and works in Berlin and Seoul

jeewi lee is a South Korean, Berlin-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice — spanning site-specific installations and interventions, video and image series — examines memory, time, and decay. Important for her work are the performative marks and imprints of the everyday, collecting and preserving “the trace” as a pictorial element and recorded archive of lived social and historical events. She questions the sphere of visual perception through drawing attention to the unnoticed, the disregarded and the seemingly non-existent. While traces appear in abstract and minimal form, they contain indexicality and narrative elements; trace both physically and conceptually exists as residues of past lives, recalling the passage of time — a visual allegory for the lived experiences of history, place, memory, and the body.

Lee studied painting at University of the Arts in Berlin and at Hunter College University in New York. She graduated in 2014 as a master student in Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Berlin and held her MFA in 2018 in the postgraduate study Art in Context. She has received various grants and artist residencies, including the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, Villa Romana Florence, and various grants from the Kunstfond Foundation. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Kunstverein in Hamburg, DAZ German architecture center, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum der Gegenwart, Gropius Bau, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Kunsthaus Vienna, and Institute for Contemporary Art Virginia. In 2023, her first monograph INDEX was published by Hatje Cantz Verlag.

selected works

For inquiries or more information, please contact info@signsandsymbols.art.

gallery exhibitions