Lee Seahyun’s practice traces back to his time in the military, where he encountered surreal, crimson-tinted landscapes while observing the Demilitarized Zone through night vision goggles.

This visceral experience became the seed for his renowned “Red Landscape” series. Since then, Lee has developed a distinctive painterly language that fuses the tradition of East Asian landscape painting with the political and emotional reality of national division—anchored by his signature use of intense red.

While his compositions follow the structure of classical Asian landscapes, closer inspection reveals unexpected elements: warships, tanks, ruins, and echoes of artillery—images that quietly evoke conflict and separation.

In Lee’s works, nature is no longer a tranquil backdrop but a terrain haunted by crisis, anxiety, and the residues of violence.

In the painting presented at this year’s Biennale, the dense crimson fields and carefully measured voids generate a heightened tension. Amid them, the shape of an island emerges—poised as both a threshold of division and a site for imagining a world not yet reached.

Lee Seahyun’s landscapes are not mere representations of reality; they are layered spaces where memory and symbolism intertwine.

Here, the scars of history, the weight of human emotion, and the fragile yet persistent presence of hope coexist.