Lee Keunmin solo show unveils raw, primal truths 'Before It Becomes a Scene'

Anatomical figures melt like liquid across the canvas. Blending reds and blues with sweeping curves, the works conjure a fantastical atmosphere that draws viewers into a primordial world.

Lee Keunmin's solo exhibition "Before It Becomes a Scene" opens Wednesday at PKM Gallery in Seoul and runs through July 25. The show marks Lee's first solo exhibition at the gallery and brings together an intensive presentation of unreleased works he has produced since 2023.

Twenty-three new works — including large-scale paintings nearly 3 meters tall and a series of drawings — are being shown in Korea for the first time.

Twenty-five years ago, Lee was hospitalized after receiving a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, an experience that exposed him to what he describes as the power of diagnosis and hallucination. He felt a kind of violence in the way modern civilization's disease classification systems — designed for efficiency — categorize and judge the natural shape of human beings. At the same time, he experienced hallucinations populated by nameless presences: fragmented bodies, remnants of once-living organisms, raw matter, wounds. Lee takes that experience of suffering as his starting point, summoning onto the canvas the beings that social systems have excluded as abnormal.

In this exhibition, a "scene" refers to any situation shaped by intention or contrivance. Lee seeks to reveal what exists before that framing takes hold — a truer, unvarnished view of humanity. Works titled "Organic Plate," "Connected Body" and "Psychiatrist's Head" draw on the disassembled, scattered body images he witnessed in his hallucinations.

Rather than simply reproducing those images, Lee synthesizes them into intricate continuums through abstract sensation. The explosive energy on his canvases reflects his authentic inner landscape and carries a sense of liberation from the social frameworks that once confined him.

The muscles, organs and traces of blood that appear in Lee's work originate in personal experience, but they ultimately speak to truths that apply to everyone — regardless of the boundaries between self and other, disabled and non-disabled. The warm reds he favors are both an instinctive attraction to flesh and blood and a metaphor for human life itself.

The drawing series "Refining Hallucinations" was completed through automatic drawing — no preliminary sketches or plans, the hand moving freely. It wraps primitive, unsettling creatures pushed to society's margins in looping lines, offering them a kind of freedom.

Lee graduated from the Department of Western Painting at Seoul National University's College of Fine Arts in 2007 and held his first solo exhibition at JK Space Gallery in Seoul in 2009. He has since mounted more than 20 solo and group exhibitions in New York, Paris, Berlin and Malmö, Sweden. In 2016 he participated in the Pioneer Works residency in New York, and his 2022 solo show "And Nobody Was Sick" at Space K drew wide attention in the contemporary art scene. His works are held in the collections of Space K and the Park Seo-bo Foundation in Korea, and Colección Solo in Spain.