131. Kyungseo Lee - Sphinx

2021
Oil on canvas
15 x 15 cm

Kyungseo Lee is a Korean artist whose work explores the conflicting emotions and values that shape contemporary human experience. Through erotically charged imagery, Lee examines the ambiguities surrounding body image, desire, intimacy, and emotional contradiction. Her paintings inhabit unstable territory — between celebration and objectification, attraction and discomfort, right and wrong — deliberately refusing resolution in favour of sustained tension. Rather than directing the viewer toward a fixed moral position, the work invites self-reflection, asking audiences to confront their own responses, assumptions, and complicities.

Lee completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London (2021–2023). She previously studied both Painting and Visual Communication Design at Hongik University, Seoul (2014–2020), and undertook an illustration exchange programme at Paris College of Art, Paris (2016).

Selected exhibitions include Phosphenes at Gallery Belenius, Stockholm, Sweden (2024); Demian at Makasiini Contemporary, Turku, Finland (2024); and Love Me/Love Me Not at LKIF Gallery, Seoul, Korea (2021).

In 2025, Lee won ART MATTERS 15 at Galerie Biesenbach and was longlisted for the Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Prize and the Jackson's Art Prize. She was also longlisted for The Waverton Art Prize in 2022 and was a semifinalist in the Adobe Design Achievement Awards in 2017.

Her work is held in a private collection by Nike in Seoul, Korea.