Lee Nayoung

《Silent Tremor – Lingering Traces》 Poster

Lee Nayoung completed the Meisterschüler program at Kunstakademie Münster and gained recognition through her active practice in Germany. Since returning to Korea in 2014, she continues her work.

Installation View (1)

Lee Nayoung’s paintings give visual form to subtle vibrations of emotion accumulated in the body through lived experience. Rather than focusing on a specific narrative, her practice reveals the residual vibrations of lived experience that persist in perception and memory, allowing them to surface on the canvas.

Lee Nayoung, Longing, 2026, Oil on canvas, 120x230cm

The emotions and memories she has carried do not disappear over time but persist in the body as faint, continuous tremors. The artist begins her work at the moment she attends to these vibrations. Within subtle tensions and bodily responses, her paintings take form.

Lee Nayoung, Taking a Breath 1, 2026, Oil on canvas, 60.6×72.7cm

Her sensibility was formed early in life. Emotions of unease and melancholy, difficult to articulate in language, were first inscribed in the body. Painting became a space in which she could exist without the need for control or explanation. Unlike musical notation, painting unfolds through an internal rhythm, becoming her most natural form of expression.

Lee Nayoung, Silhouette of Darkness, 2026, Oil on canvas, 90x80cm

Where early self-portraiture once served as a means of confronting the self, her current practice moves beyond fixed figuration. Faces, shadows, and blurred forms remain not as resolved images, but as traces of emotional passage. She instead attends to what moves beneath form—the vibration as a bodily language, which she refers to as “tremor.” The long-used Payne’s Gray becomes a symbolic presence in this practice. Once associated with a sense of melancholy she resisted, it has become a color she continues to return to, suggesting an unconscious continuity with the past and a sustained attention to emotional states that cannot be avoided.

Lee Nayoung, Sunken Light 1, 2026, Oil on canvas, 57x45cm

Her paintings do not seek interpretation, but invite viewers to encounter their own inner resonance. The process involves staying with sensations that are often difficult to bear, and even the subtle variations that arise within this attention are absorbed into the work. Within this, a quiet possibility of healing emerges. These recent works signal a transitional moment in the artist’s practice. The exploration of emotional vibration beyond figuration continues, and fluctuation itself defines the present state of her painting. This exhibition is structured around these sensorial reflections.

Gallery Palzo

Lee Nayoung, First Grain, 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 57x45cm

Deep within us resides a low vibration—an inexplicable resonance stirring from the soul.
At times, it approaches like a heavy, ashen wave that we are tempted to avoid. Yet, I do not recoil from this weighty tremor; instead, I confront it as the fundamental sensation that sustains my very existence. This exhibition, ‘Silent Tremor – Lingering Traces’, serves as a record of layering the present over the turbulent waves of the past.

Lee Nayoung, Water’s Surface of Memory, 2025, Oil on canvas, 80x120cm

The images built upon the canvas are not intended to erase what once was. Rather, they are a gesture of embracing the lingering tremors, allowing them to seep naturally into the fabric of my current life.
The botanical shadows and serene silhouettes emerging from between these layers are testaments of light that have endured through heavy times—a quiet affirmation of the life I face today. In the subtle threshold where traces of the past intersect with the light of the present, the once-rough vibrations finally settle into a tranquil tremor. It is my hope that this quiet tremor will find its way into your heart, lingering as a gentle, resonant echo.

Lee Nayoung

GALLERY PALZO
2F, 145-3, Yonghak-ro, Suseong-gu, Daegu, 42216 Republic of Korea
+82-53-781-6802

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