Lee Su Jin (b. 1983, South Korea) paints the quiet tremors beneath ordinary life, capturing the psychological unease embedded in the everyday. Borrowing emotionally neutral imagery — film stills, mundane objects, and diagrammatic forms — she reshapes them into cinematic tableaux where stillness vibrates with hidden tension. What seems familiar becomes subtly estranged; the mundane, suddenly charged.

 

In Lee’s work, anxiety flickers like a faint but persistent soundtrack. Rooms without occupants feel inhabited by memory, objects carry the weight of absent narratives, and fragments of the human figure appear like clues in an unresolved scene. Through this deliberate withholding, she transforms personal anxiety into a shared sensibility, inviting viewers to navigate the unstable boundary between calm and dread.

 

Her paintings operate as quiet confrontations: moments where fear is neither magnified nor dismissed, but held long enough for its nuances to emerge. In balancing tension with tranquillity, and strangeness with serenity, Lee reframes anxiety not as a singular emotion but as a medium for painterly exploration; a prism through which emotion itself can be seen differently. Through this transformation, introspection becomes cinematic, and the everyday becomes a site for deeper reflection.

 

Lee majored in Painting (BFA) at Kookmin University and received her MFA from the same institution.