John Hyen Lee: Dark, Light, Dark presents paintings that treat Hangul — the Korean writing system — as a vocabulary of paint, consecutive marks mimicking the act of committing form to memory before dissolving into abstraction through cycles of application and erasure. Lee handcrafts the wooden panels that support his paintings, a practice rooted in growing up with a father who built their family home. The panel frame itself becomes a primary painterly mark in certain works, incorporated into the composition so that wood is never mere utility. Together, the works form a multilingual dialogue that dissociates letters from literal meaning and material from function.
