Haevan Lee
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ABOUT
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Haevan Lee
Born and raised near the DMZ in Cheorwon, Gangwon-do, Haevan Lee (b. 1990) lives and works between Korea and the Netherlands. Through painting, installation, and video, she transforms militarized borderlands into immersive landscape environments where geopolitical fracture seeps into space, sensation, and the body. Moving between psychological terrain and lived geography, Lee approaches the border not as a fixed line of separation, but as a perceptual condition.
Emerging from Lee’s research into the “buffer zone”—a territory suspended between separation and contact—the Battleground series unfolds through pastel-hued terrains poised between pastoral reverie and latent unease, where organic forms, fragmented bodily traces, and symbols recalling military markings drift across the surface, dissolving distinctions between landscape, memory, and corporeality. Extending beyond the pictorial frame into installation, her works transform into fluid spatial environments in which softness and threat, intimacy and surveillance, remain in quiet tension. For Lee, the buffer zone appears less as a site of division than as a living threshold where vulnerability, instability, and transformation continually converge.
Lee received her BFA in Oriental Painting from Sungkyunkwan University and her MFA in Artistic Research from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague in the Netherlands. Her major solo exhibitions include Kumho Museum of Art (Seoul, 2025), Insa Art Space (Seoul, 2024), Bradwolff Projects (Netherlands, 2024), Gallery Lux (Seoul, 2020), and Peace Culture Bunker (Seoul, 2018). Selected group exhibitions include Museum Arnhem, (Netherlands, 2025), G Gallery (Seoul, 2025), Stroom Den Haag (Netherlands, 2024), Eurocenter (Netherlands, 2023), Marres (Netherlands, 2022), Omstand (Netherlands, 2022), NEST (Netherlands, 2022), De Helena (Netherlands, 2021), Culture Station Seoul 284 (Seoul, 2021), Quartair (Netherlands, 2021), Palacio de la Autonomía (Mexico City, 2020), and Bangkok Art Biennale (Thailand, 2020). She is scheduled to participate in the Delfina Foundation Residency (London) in September 2026 and has participated in residencies including the MMCA Residency (Korea, 2025), Artist in Retreat Residency (Sweden, 2021), and the Peace Culture Bunker Residency (Seoul). Lee’s work is held in the collections of the Government Art Bank, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea and Hana Bank, Korea.
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WORKS
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EXHIBITIONS
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NEWS
![[Left to Right] Haevan Lee The Railroad gone Mt. Geumgang, 2012 Tieback, wood frame, oil on canvas 180 x 106 cm Civilian Control Line 1, 2012 Tieback, wood frame, oil on canvas 192.2 x 97 cm The Border and a Frozen Stream, 2012 Tieback, wood frame, oil on canvas 165 x 148 cm Installation view, Pyeongchang Biennale & Gangneung Folk Art Festival, 2017](https://static-assets.artlogic.net/w_2400,h_2400,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto/ws-artlogicwebsite0581/usr/library/images/main/feature_panels/614/14.jpg)
