Ahnnlee Lee Korea, b. 1985

Ahnnlee Lee received his BFA and MFA from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Grounded in his own sensibility, he carefully observes small presences and fleeting moments in everyday life—seeds, leaves, flowers, fruits, lights, and birds—expressing their pure essence through balanced and refined forms.

Beyond drawing, the artist employs a range of gestures such as stitching, weaving, and scraping, breathing vitality into quiet and modest beings and moments. He takes pleasure in intimately observing the objects and occurrences that surround him in daily life. In particular, he frequently engages with natural materials—plants and marine byproducts among them—articulating the ‘gestures’ that arise from them and structuring these movements through diverse modes of practice, including drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture.

Ahnnlee Lee’s practice is an attempt to reconstruct memory. Motifs that have become abstract fragments serve as passages through which memories resurface; forms from the unconscious stimulate the senses and captivate the mind, arriving unexpectedly. This process resembles the poetic and symbolic inner landscape preserved in his memory. As objects in themselves, these traces are deeply connected to the territories he has inhabited, where secrets of the past, culture, and home have taken root. Each line and layer forms a restrained structure that calms the mind and gathers scattered elements into quiet concentration.