Taedong Lee was born in 1989, Seoul, South Korea. The artist obtained his MA Fine Art:
Painting from Camberwell College of Arts, London in 2020 and his BA in Painting Fine Arts
from Gachon University College of Arts, Korea in 2016. Lee’s solo and group exhibitions
includes: Cuturi gallery, Singapore (2022) Another Beginning, Brown hands, Gumi, South Korea (2023), Landscape, Taymour grahne projects satellite, London (2022), Spiral life, Suchang Youth Mansion, Daegu, South Korea (2021) and London Grads Show, Saatchi Gallery,
London (2020).
Taedong Lee works with motifs of memory and feelings related to the landscape, which
was either visited, seen in a picture, or read in a book. By distorting the image through a
combination of impasto and thin layers of paint, Lee transforms classical scenes of nature
into nostalgic compositions, where forests, rivers and sky begin to blend into a single,
impressionistic whole.
With this, the artist attempts to reconstruct a new space which he calls a "phantom place";
an emotional mélange between memory of the past and feelings of the present. As the
artist explains, "my work begins by reflecting on the experience of a landscape, the vision,
the touch, the smell, and the sounds of that time. More than just transferring memories,
the recollected landscape elements are reinterpreted into a new space with various color
harmony and techniques that express my own fundamental feelings.”