Lee Ho-cheol: A World Held in Fifteen Canvases

Open a drawer and find the sky. Lee Ho Chul paints the everyday while slipping endless train tracks and floating hats inside half-open drawers. 15 SAF works.

Lee Ho Chul, Encore, acrylic on canvas, 91×73 cm

Open a Drawer and Find the Sky

Looking carefully at his paintings, you notice something odd.

A dining table, glasses, a coffee cup, a chair. Familiar everyday objects. Quietly placed, as if the owner stepped away. But look into a half-open drawer — the sky stretches out. Endless railroad tracks appear. A distant field emerges.

Objects much larger than the drawer live inside it. A hat and gloves float calmly in midair.

Among everyday objects, an entirely different world suddenly intrudes. This is what Lee Ho Chul's (b. 1958) paintings do.

No Loud Declarations

Lee Ho Chul, born 1958 in Seoul, graduated from Hongik University. He was introduced to the art world when he received an encouragement prize at the first JoongAng Fine Arts Competition in 1978. He then won the 1990 Monte Carlo Art Grand Prize and the 1994 Gongshin Art Festival Grand Prize in succession.

But what stands out more than decorated prizes is the continuity of the practice. He held his first solo at Kumho Museum of Art in 1990, and since then 25+ solos at Noh Gallery, Pyo Gallery, Arario, Sun Gallery, and others. He was active internationally at Kyoto International Impact Art Festival and Tokyo's 8th JAALA, and has joined well over 300 domestic and international group shows.

An artist who has honed his pictorial language quietly, without loud declarations.

The Philosophy of Half-Open Drawers

Critic Suh Sung-rok said, looking at his paintings, that it feels like "reading a diary."

A diary is private. But in Lee Ho Chul's diary, strange events slip in. There is no fully open drawer. It is half open, or even open, the interior faces away from the gaze. More drawers stay firmly closed.

This "not fully showing" is the core. The excitement of unwrapping a package; the curiosity just before a play's curtain rises. His painting stimulates these psychologies subtly. Meticulous fine-brush depictions of window shadows, awnings, interior structures — suggestive devices that stir imagination.

The whole and the sudden, the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the unconscious. In the tension their collisions produce, the viewer gains the freedom to dream.

Lee Ho Chul, The Great Resurrection, acrylic on canvas & Supermirror, 90.9×72.7 cm

Stepping Outside the Frame

His practice doesn't stay with drawers and objects. He has extended his concern to the painting's frame itself.

His paintings already contain a painted frame, so they need no separate one. He has drawn the frame into the painting as a core element. Taking a step further, he has experimented with altering the canvas's shape itself. Departing from the rectangular canvas to introduce variously shaped canvases is an act dissolving the inside/outside boundary of the surface. Not dreaming freedom only within the virtual image, but pulling that freedom out into actual space.

Collections include Samsung Group, Seoul Museum of Art, Asiana Airlines, Busan Museum of Art, Daejeon Museum of Art, Gwangju Museum of Art, Jeonnam Provincial Museum of Art. Also the Mexico Embassy, Monaco, Hong Kong, and Dubai.

Fifteen Drawers

Lee Ho Chul contributes 15 works to SAF 2026 — from the Encore series and the Great Resurrection series. The highest number of works from one artist in the exhibition.

It is also a way of opening closed drawers. So more people can stand in front of his paintings. So someone tired of the daily treadmill can find a sky inside a drawer. Sale revenue returns as low-interest loans to fellow artists facing financial discrimination.

Open a drawer and find the sky. That is what Lee Ho Chul's painting does.