Keunmin Lee

Keunmin Lee (b. in South Korea in 1982), lives and works in Seoul.

Keunmin Lee’s paintings transcribe the sensations experienced during hallucinatory episodes, plunging us into deep compositions with rich red hues, inside a body without limits or exteriority. About twenty years ago, Keunmin Lee was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, a term that covers a very broad spectrum, from instability in relationships and self-image to extreme sensitivity to his environment. This diagnosis was, in essence, a form of cold definition that offered no space for alternative interpretations beyond the diagnostic label and its corresponding code, a rigid and unyielding categorization reducing an identity to an illness. For Lee, painting is an introspective and emancipatory practice in the face of this process of rationalization and quantification of sensitive, immaterial experiences. This opens the way for him to reappropriate his illness and resist social categorization, dissociating himself from art brut (outsider art) through his constant self-reflection. He paints his hallucinations in such a way as to affirm their creative and subversive potential, giving them a positive aspect rather than reducing them to the status of mere symptoms. Systems - blood, digestive, organic - thus become a metaphor for social systems, digesting, grouping individuals to obtain what they need to function, to the detriment of each person’s individuality and differences. Omnipresent in Keunmin Lee’s canvases, the body is crudely revealed to better escape norms and appeal to our deepest interiority.

His recent exhibitions include: ‘‘When hallucination is no longer a symptom’’ (solo), Galerie Derouillon, Paris (2025); ‘‘iwillmedievalfutureyou2’’, Lilith Performance Studio, Malmö (2025); ‘‘I am your Body: Chapter 2 - Flesh’’, Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus (2024); ‘‘Realizing Boundaries’’ (solo), Peres Projects, Berlin (2024); ‘‘What happens when we cry?’’, curated by Marion Coindeau, Galerie Derouillon, Paris (2024); ‘‘The Sum of our Parts’’, Swivel Gallery, New York (2024); ‘‘Embodied Depths’’ (duo), with Jessica Meeson Pae, Nexx Asia, Taipei City (2023); ‘Recombinant’’ (duo), with Mandy El-Sayegh, Lehmann Maupin, Seoul (2022); ‘‘And then none were sick’’ (solo), Space K, Seoul (2022); ‘‘Revisiting the Art of Painting: Modern Figurative Paintings by Korean Artists’’, CYAN Museum of Art, Youngcheon (2017); ‘‘Ugly as Art’’, Seoul National University Museum of Art, Seoul (2017); ‘‘All the Windows to the World’’, Blume Museum of Contemporary Art, Paju (2015); ‘‘The Portrait of Hallucination’’ (solo), Gallery Dam, Seoul (2013); ‘‘Selected Drawings’’ (solo), Salon de Factory, Seoul (2009); ‘‘JK Space Gallery’’ (solo), Seoul (2009); ‘‘Space Coordinate’’, Space K, Seoul (2004).

Public Collection: Space K, Seoul (KR); Park Seo-Bo Foundation, Seoul (KR); Colección Solo, Madrid (ES)