A painting that
continues

To choose painting is already a kind of courage. To choose to study it thousands of miles from home, in a language not your own, is something more. Lee Chaewon's story begins with that decision: leaving Korea to enroll at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, one of the oldest degree-granting art colleges in the United States.

MICA's painting program is among the most regarded in the country, and for an international undergraduate the demands are doubled — the work itself, and the daily labor of building a life and a practice in an unfamiliar place. Over four years, from 2021 to 2024, she did both. The recognition that came her way along the road — institutional scholarships, departmental honors — was the quiet evidence that she belonged in the room.

This is the part of an artist's biography that rarely makes the wall text: the years before the first solo show, when the work is being built and no one is yet watching. Lee Chaewon's presence in this campaign is, in part, a portrait of that period — the long, unglamorous beginning that every sustained practice requires.

In 2024 Lee Chaewon graduated from MICA with a B.F.A. in Painting summa cum laude— “with highest honor.” It is the top of three Latin distinctions and is reserved for the very narrow band of students at the top of a graduating class.

It is worth pausing on what that distinction asks of an international student specifically. The honor is calculated over the full arc of a degree, which means it cannot be won in a single strong semester; it requires consistency across years — through the disorientation of a first year abroad, through the accumulating pressure of upper-level critique, through a thesis. Earned in a second language and a foreign system, the distinction is less a trophy than a measure of stamina.

Read alongside her record at MICA — the repeated international-student award, the scholarships, the departmental recognitions — the pattern is not of a single breakthrough but of steady, compounding work. That is the most reliable predictor of a long career: not a flash, but a habit.

A first solo exhibition is a threshold. For many artists it arrives years after graduation, if at all. Lee Chaewon held hers the same year she finished her degree, at Lazarus Hall Gallery in Baltimore, on West North Avenue, in the heart of the city's arts district.

The title she chose — To Be Continued— is the quiet center of her story so far. It refuses the temptation to treat a first show as an arrival. A graduation, the title insists, is punctuation, not a full stop: the comma between a beginning and everything that follows. It is a young artist's promise to keep going, made in public.

That promise is also what brings her to this campaign. The works gathered here are early works by an emerging painter — and that is precisely the point. A purchase here is not a memorial to a finished career but an investment in one still being made, and at the same time a contribution to the mutual-aid fund that lets other artists keep working. Her sentence, and theirs, is to be continued.