Letters and signs,
an Esperanto of emotion

Esperanto was invented as a neutral, shared language — a tongue belonging to no nation, designed so that strangers might understand one another. Lee Eun-hwa borrows that ambition and turns it toward emotion. Her recurring project 〈Emotional Esperanto〉 asks whether feeling, too, could have a common language: not words, but letters and signs arranged into a visual grammar.

The series unfolds across a decade. Emotional Esperanto at Artspace Mieum (2004) sets the premise; Digilog (2016) folds the digital and the analog into one another; Monoticon (2017) compresses emotion into an icon-like sign. In each, the work treats feeling not as something ineffable but as something that can be encoded — and therefore shared.

What holds the series together is a writer's instinct toward legibility. Lee does not paint emotion as expression; she sets it down as a system, a set of marks a viewer can learn to read. The result is a body of work that sits between picture and text — fitting, for an artist who is also a writer about art.

In the 2020s Lee's subject sharpens into the city and its appetites. Moneyscape (Coffee Esperanto, Seoul, 2022) takes money itself as landscape — the contemporary metropolis seen as terrain shaped by capital, where value and longing are inseparable.

〈The Room of Desire〉 (Young Eun Museum's Y.Park / Haslla branch, Yeongwol, 2023) builds an interior for that longing. Desire, here, is not a moral failing but a structuring force of urban life — the engine of the identities city dwellers assemble for themselves. The exhibition reads the metropolis as a place where money, want, and selfhood overlap and blur.

These projects extend the logic of the Esperanto series outward, from the private grammar of feeling to the public grammar of the city. If emotion can be encoded, so can desire — and the encoded city becomes a text the artist invites us to read alongside her.

Lee Eun-hwa works on two axes at once. On one, she makes — painting, installation, new media, the participatory room of 〈A Room of Hospitality: Welcome VIP〉 (2025), the bound media of Tell Me The Story (2024). On the other, she writes — books such as Paintings with a Story, The Room of Paintings, A Journey to Nordic Art Museums, and The Minimum 100 Artworks for Today's Grown-ups.

The two axes feed one another. Her writing carries the scholar's training of her doctoral years; her practice carries the writer's drive toward legibility. Across nine solo exhibitions and shows at major Korean museums, she has consistently built new formats that fuse art with other fields — and her books extend that fusion to the reading public.

It is a rare position: to be at once a contemporary artist developing new forms and a writer translating art for a wide audience. In both roles, the same impulse holds — to make the difficult feeling, the dense image, the distant museum, legible and shared.