Hollowed colors,
between sculpture and painting

Lee Jieun's training began in sculpture. Her BA and MA at Kookmin University were in the department of three-dimensional art, and that grounding is legible throughout her later work: a sensitivity to how a form occupies space, to weight and hollowness, to the difference between a surface and a volume. Where many painters arrive at abstraction by reducing an image, Lee arrives at it by building an object and then asking what happens at its surface.

This is why her practice resists the usual division between the sculptural and the pictorial. A structured, woven, or carved form is not a sculpture that has been photographed flat; it is a proposition about how the logic of construction can register as color and image on a plane. The picture plane, in turn, is treated not as a window but as a thin solid — something with an inside.

The earliest exhibitions already name this concern. 〈Boundary of skin〉 (2009) and 〈Studies for between spaces〉 (2015) both locate the work at a threshold — skin, interval, the space between spaces. The question was set early, and the decades since have been a sustained refinement of it.

Three words recur as titles across her exhibitions, and together they read almost as a method. 〈structure〉 (Munich, 2023) names the armature: the visible logic of how a thing is built, exposed rather than hidden. 〈reversed〉 (Cologne, 2019) names the operation: turning the inside out, making the back of a form its face. And 〈Hollowed Colors〉 (Seoul, 2025) names the result: color that is emptied rather than applied — a hue that belongs to a cavity, an absence, a space that has been carved away.

Read together, these are not three separate bodies of work but one continuous inquiry into the abstract object. Structure is exposed so that it can be reversed; reversal hollows the form; the hollow is where color lives. Abstraction here is not decorative arrangement but an investigation of conditions — what color is when it is not filling an image, what a form is when its inside has become its outside.

The tone throughout is minimal and exacting. There is no narrative to decode and no figure to recognise. What the work asks of a viewer is attention to the object itself: its edges, its intervals, its emptied color — the quiet precision of an abstraction that holds its questions in the open.

Lee Jieun's formation crosses two art-educational cultures. The sculptural foundation came from Kookmin University in Seoul; the conceptual sharpening came from Germany — first the University of the Arts Bremen, then the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The Düsseldorf academy is among the most influential art schools in Europe, and the class of Prof. Franka Hörnschemeyer, which works across media on questions of spatial relation, gave her concerns a rigorous home.

Completing the Meisterschüler — the academy's designation for a master student recognised by a professor — is a marker of that engagement. But the more important inheritance is methodological: a way of treating the relationship between a form and the space around it as the primary subject of the work, rather than a support for some other content.

Her exhibition record reflects this dual ground. The solo and group shows cluster in Germany — Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, with a stop at Luxembourg Art Week — while the 〈Hollowed Colors〉 exhibition (Seoul, 2025) and a forthcoming 2026 exhibition at the CICA Museum in Gimpo return the work to Korea. The question travels; it does not change.