Jeewi Lee, born in 1987 in Seoul, lives and works between Berlin and Seoul. Her practice—site-specific installations, sculptures, and videos—explores notions of memory, time, and decay through the concept of the trace: the material and visual residues of past lives. She studied at the Berlin University of the Arts and at Hunter College in New York, and has received the Villa Romana Prize as well as grants from the Kunstfonds Foundation.

More about Jeewi

Field of Fragments

In Field of Fragments, Jeewi Lee presents a series of paintings created using sand collected from various coastal regions. Applied to jute and wood surfaces, these materials form understated surfaces where color and texture emerge directly from the material itself. Each composition thus carries the specific tone of its place of origin: pale, volcanic, ochre, or gray, shaped by local geology and natural processes.

Rather than representing a landscape, the works are literally composed of it. Sand is not a neutral medium: it is at once matter, memory, and trace. Each grain is the result of long transformations resulting from erosion, transport, and sedimentation. By assembling these fragments, the artist creates surfaces that condense extended timeframes and multiple geographies.

The grainy textures absorb light and react subtly to the viewer’s movements. Depending on the viewing angle, the surface appears to shift, oscillating between image and matter. This perceptual instability invites a slower, more attentive gaze, attuned to the slightest variations.

What may appear minimal at first glance thus reveals great density. The works bear witness to the slow dynamics that shape landscapes, while highlighting their fragility in the face of contemporary transformations. Field of Fragments offers a sensory experience that engages the gaze in a more attentive relationship with the material world, highlighting how landscapes persist in the form of traces, carried by fragments of matter.