Title: Whie Still
Date : 25. Aug. ~ 30. Sep., 2026
Opening : 25. Aug., Tue., 4 pm
Place : Artertain (Augustastrasse 31, 40477, Duesseldorf. Germany)
Curator : Heeseung Hwang (+82 (0)2-6160-8445)

Dusseldorf, 25 August, 2026

While Still

Time passes. Yet not every moment we experience exists in the same way. Some moments are so ordinary that they simply pass us by; others break free from the everyday and become memories. Still others, recurring in similar forms, remain in our minds as images.
Countless fragments of memory pass through us like trains arriving at a platform. Some stop only briefly before departing; others leave and unexpectedly return. In this sense, time resembles a train that continually sets the platform of our consciousness into motion, a place where memories, sensations, and images arrive, intersect, disappear, and reappear.

Seen from this perspective, Lee Seunghoon’s artistic practice begins largely with the moment when time becomes image.
In the animation works that have long formed an important part of his practice, movement emerges through the temporal succession - the duration - of countless still images. Each individual image remains motionless, yet once time enters the interval between one image and the next, we perceive movement. Even within the brief instant of a blink, an invisible gap exists between the image that preceded it and the one that follows. Our senses and memories bridge these interruptions, constructing a continuous world and allowing us, ultimately, to experience reality as a multidimensional whole.

Stillness + Time = Movement.

Lee’s recent approach to painting begins by reversing this long-established principle of animation.
The artist remains before a small potted plant. Working with pen, ink, and Korean ink - traditional black ink - he places a dot, draws a line, pauses, and looks again. The subject itself barely moves. Yet throughout the act of looking, time remains in constant motion. Light changes, the position of the gaze shifts, and the artist’s body, emotions, and memories undergo subtle transformations. With each of these changes, another dot or line is left upon the surface.

Time + Stillness = Painting.

For Lee, drawing is therefore less an attempt to reproduce an object accurately than an act of reading and recording the temporal and sensory information that reaches him while he looks.

This attitude resonates with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of embodied perception. For Merleau-Ponty, we are not detached observers standing outside the world and objectively examining it. We already exist within the world. Through our bodies, we see, touch, and move through it, while at the same time being affected and transformed by it. Perception is therefore not the passive reception of a completed reality, but an ongoing process through which meaning emerges in the relationship between body and world.

From this perspective, the potted plants Lee observes are no longer simply objects of still life.
The duration of his gaze, the posture of his body, the movement of his hand, the pressure of the pen, memories and emotions, changes in light, and the repetition of looking all enter the image together with the subject itself. It also reflects the artist’s conviction that the acts of seeing and drawing, the perceived object, and the artist’s body cannot ultimately be separated from one another.

Consider the familiar phenomenon of a well-used ballpoint pen. As it moves across the paper, ink gradually accumulates around its tip until, at some unexpected moment, it forms a small clot and settles onto the surface. In everyday Korean, this insignificant residue is colloquially called bolpen-ttong?literally, “ballpoint-pen droppings.” Ordinarily it is regarded as little more than an imperfection in the functioning of a pen. Seen differently, however, it can be understood as a moment in which the accumulated duration of the pen’s movement becomes materially visible.

The repeated dots in Lee’s work can be read in a similar way.

One dot belongs to one moment; the dot beside it already belongs to another. When hundreds or thousands of dots and lines accumulate into a single image, we may recognize a plant or a flowerpot. Yet within that image are layered the many different moments through which the artist has observed his subject.

Time continues to pass while the artist draws, but within the drawing, time comes to a halt.
The restrained surfaces composed of black pen, meok, and the untouched space of the paper should therefore not be understood simply as the result of removing colour. Rather, as the intensity of chromatic events recedes, other forms of information become increasingly perceptible: the distance between one dot and another, the speed of a line, the pressure of the hand, repetition and interruption, and even the areas where nothing has been drawn.

In Lee’s work, it is not so much that colour has been reduced; rather, the conditions for perceiving and evaluating time and sensation have been intensified.

His restrained palette can therefore be understood not simply as a monochromatic surface, but as a field in which countless distinct moments coexist within the same colour.

This development does not represent a simple transition from animation to painting. Instead, the two practices approach a longstanding artistic question from opposite directions, revealing the possibility that they may ultimately converge.

In animation, still images acquire time and become movement.
In painting, time - constantly moving and passing - enters a single image and comes to rest.

At the centre of both practices remains the same fundamental concern: the body that sees and the senses that remember.
Lee’s period in Dusseldorf provides an important context in which to test these questions within a new environment. Removed from familiar places, language, and the rhythms of everyday life, the body begins to perceive and read its surroundings at a different pace. The modest and restrained subject of a potted plant becomes, precisely through its simplicity, an intimate field of perception onto which the artist’s sensations and memories of encountering an unfamiliar city can be projected.

This exhibition should therefore be understood not as the presentation of a completed or fixed artistic style, but as a transitional moment in which Lee Seunghoon’s practice expands from time-based imagery toward embodied painting, and from the representation of movement toward the accumulation of perception.

It is precisely this capacity for transformation that opens an important possibility for Lee’s work to encounter new audiences in Europe.
Rather than presenting Korean identity through immediately recognizable cultural symbols, his practice transforms universal questions?time and the body, memory and perception?into concrete images through personal experience and the repetition of artistic gestures. In doing so, the work does not erase cultural difference. Instead, it creates an open perceptual space in which viewers from different cultural backgrounds may enter the work through their own experiences of seeing, remembering, sensing, and passing through time.

Text by Gustav Daishik Yim