Jaesam Lee paints nocturnal landscapes with charcoal\u2014wood transformed by fire. Charcoal is ordinarily a material for underdrawing, but for Lee it is the primary medium that completes the painting. What he seeks to capture is not a landscape clearly visible to the eye, but the aura of moonlight suffused through darkness. The artist describes moonlight as “an emotional light that reveals itself only when felt with a sixth sense, not merely seen with the eyes.”<\/p>\n
\nLee majored in Western Painting at Gangneung-Wonju National University and earned a master’s degree in Western painting from the Graduate School of Hongik University. He has since built a distinctive body of work that moves beyond the framework of Western contemporary art to embody the spirit and identity of the Korean Peninsula. He has held solo exhibitions at the Savina Museum of Contemporary Art, Mimesis Art Museum, and the Park Soo Keun Museum, among others. He received the Park Soo Keun Art Award in 2018 and was selected for the Jeon Hyeok-Lim Art Award in 2025.<\/p>\n
\nHis work begins with seeking out nature in person. Lee travels across the country in search of centuries-old trees and forests to sketch. To these he adds his own thoughts and conceptions, reviving them as new landscapes that are real yet unreal. His method of filling the picture plane is simple: he rubs charcoal onto the canvas again and again, building a black space deep within the surface. For him, the black of charcoal exists not as a color but as “black space.” To give full rein to the energy of nature, he chooses monumental canvases over small ones.<\/p>\n
\nCharcoal is, by origin, a material for underdrawing and sketching. Because it smudges and erases easily, it is rarely used in finished works. Lee devoted years to overturning this convention, researching and experimenting until he transformed charcoal into a painting material capable of lasting preservation. For him, charcoal is the black mass that remains after wood has burned all day in a kiln\u2014at once the death of the tree and another birth. He calls charcoal “a sarira of the forest’s soul, drawn out by burning the tree” and “a fateful material through which chance arrived as necessity.”<\/p>\n
\nAt this year’s Kiaf, Jaesam Lee presents charcoal paintings including the MOONSCAPE Series and PINKMOON. The entire booth has been composed as a dreamlike space of moonlit nocturnal scenes and a forest of plum trees. The artist hopes that visitors will wander among the “plum trees holding moonlight” and experience a “Moontan Road” \u2014a path for walking bathed in moonlight. Before the vast black canvases, viewers are drawn into the unfamiliar experience of sensing moonlight not with their eyes but with their entire body.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"template":"","categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62454","highlight","type-highlight","status-publish","hentry"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.0","language":"en","enabled_languages":["ko","en"],"languages":{"ko":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false}}},"acf":{"\bshow_only_admin":false,"thumbnail":62467,"gallery":"Gallery Grimson","hide_han":false,"hide_eng":false,"artworks":[{"artwork_img":62506,"artwork_desc":"MOONSCAPE, Charcoal and Acrylic on Canvas, 160\u00d7720cm, 2017"},{"artwork_img":62507,"artwork_desc":"MOONSCAPE, Charcoal on canvas, 194\u00d751 cm, 2019"},{"artwork_img":62508,"artwork_desc":"MOONSCAPE, Charcoal on Canvas, 227\u00d7910 cm, 2016"}],"category":[111,107]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kiaf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/highlight\/62454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kiaf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/highlight"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kiaf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/highlight"}],"acf:term":[{"embeddable":true,"taxonomy":"category","href":"https:\/\/kiaf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories\/107"},{"embeddable":true,"taxonomy":"category","href":"https:\/\/kiaf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories\/111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kiaf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kiaf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kiaf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}