Lee Hyeonjeong walked onto a frozen river in 2018 with chili powder. Kimchi as self-portrait — fermentation as how time turns matter.
In winter 2018, Lee Hyeonjeong walked onto a frozen river.
In her hand, chili powder. Over the cold white surface, red bled out. An eruption of suppressed feeling, and at the same time a way of still being alive that reveals itself within a frozen world. This was the first scene of her practice. Its title: Breath-Path. That year she was selected as an artist for the PyeongChang Winter Olympics Cultural Olympics program, presenting a project in the DMZ.
Until Kimchi Became a Self-Portrait
That scene extended from 2019 into a kimchi series.
For Lee Hyeonjeong, kimchi is not food. It is self-portrait. The process of being salted, mixed, and — within waiting — slowly changing into other tastes and textures. It resembles the way scar and memory move and change in life. Fermentation is time turning matter. Her paintings press that transformation onto canvas.
A magazine from the Korean Food Promotion Institute described it this way: "For the artist, kimchi is more than food — a self-portrait carrying lived time and the process of fermentation."
Fierce red. Vivid physicality. She does not let that discomfort be consumed only as shock. Inside it she holds the warmth and the possibility of recovery of surviving time. Kimchi has a heart, and like a heart, kimchi beats.
Where Breath Meets Heart
In Breath — Uimishimjang, Lee Hyeonjeong does not explain breath and heart as bodily phenomena.
Life and death. Matter and non-matter. The point where past, present, and future touch. She has viewers experience that point bodily, in space. The sense where you-and-I connection occurs. That is the purpose of the work.
Her practice begins from painting and extends into installation and performance. In the Lee-ssi! Drifting Record series, she reweaves a family's experience through gauze book, archive, video, and installation. Work conveying a time difficult to translate into words in the language of sensation. Creating paths where things that disappeared return as sensation.
Fermentation Across Borders
Eight solos. Domestically at Gallery Hoho, CICA Museum, Alternative Art Space Ipo, Jeong Mun-gyu Art Museum; abroad in Kathmandu, Nepal (2020), Fukuoka, Japan (2022·2023).
In 2023, Lee Hyeonjeong was invited to Kunstraum Potsdam, Germany. UTOPIA?! PEACE exhibition and performance. Red physicality and fermentation time bled again in a European space. That year, also an exhibition at the Berlin Wall Memorial.
In 2024, the 2nd Fukuoka Art Award, Excellence Prize. The work was acquired by the Fukuoka Art Museum.
Awards aren't numbers. Evidence that an inquiry begun on the frozen river of 2018 has, through time, acquired another taste and texture. Like kimchi.
As of 2026, she has been selected as a long-term resident artist at Busan Cultural Foundation's Hongti Art Center, continuing her practice from Busan.
Fermenting Solidarity
Lee Hyeonjeong contributes works to SAF.
Fermentation is a process that teaches waiting. Though bitter and uncomfortable now, given time, it becomes something else. 84.9% of Korean artists are excluded from institutional finance. This number, too, is fermenting. The mutual-aid fund SAF-exhibiting artists build through their works returns as low-interest loans to artists facing financial discrimination. Holding onto uncomfortable reality to the end, making possibility of recovery. Not different from what she has done on canvas.
The River Flows Again
After winter 2018, spring came over the ice where chili powder had bled.
When ice melts, the river flows again. Red traces blend into the river. As her kimchi matures, that red too seeps somewhere. Living things keep changing. That is fermentation, and that is life.
Works by Lee Hyeonjeong
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