Under the starlight, 2024
My work begins by reflecting on the experience of a landscape — the vision, the touch, the smell, and the sounds of that time. More than just transferring memories, the recollected landscape elements are reinterpreted into a new space with various color harmonies and techniques that express my own fundamental feelings.
— Taedong Lee
Taedong Lee (b. 1989, Seoul, South Korea) creates paintings that intertwine memory and emotion through the motif of the landscape. Often inspired by places he has visited, seen in photographs, or encountered through literature, Lee distorts traditional depictions of nature using a layered approach that combines dense impasto with delicate veils of paint. His atmospheric compositions dissolve forests, rivers, and skies into fluid, impressionistic fields where boundaries blur, evoking the shifting nature of recollection.
Lee describes these works as “phantom places”: spaces that arise from the interplay between remembered past and present feeling. Each painting seeks to reconstruct an internal landscape, channeling the sensory impressions—sight, touch, smell, and sound—of moments experienced. In doing so, Lee emphasizes not the literal transcription of a scene, but the emotional imprint it leaves behind, allowing memory to act as a generative force in shaping new pictorial worlds.
Lee received his MA in Fine Art: Painting from Camberwell College of Arts, London, in 2020, and his BA in Painting from Gachon University College of Arts, Seoul, in 2016. His recent solo exhibition Emerald Island (Taymour Grahne Projects, London, 2021) and group shows including Hysterica (M.A.D.S. Art Gallery, Milan, 2021), Asyaaf (Hongik Museum of Art, Seoul, 2021), and the London Grads Show (Saatchi Gallery, London, 2020) have positioned him among an emerging generation of contemporary painters working across international contexts. His practice has been featured in Saatchi Art – Rising Stars (2021) and Mister Motley. Lee currently lives and works in Seoul, where he continues to develop his meditative approach to painting as a conduit between memory, perception, and place.