Spring/Break LA 2024 Artist Spotlight: Kay Seohyung Lee
Kate Provisor, Art Muse LA Spring Intern
Spring/Break ‘24 was packed with vibrant color, strange shapes, and a wide range of mediums. Among these up-and-coming artists was Kay Seohyung Lee, a recent MFA graduate from Philadelphia. Her most recent series, Hellscapes, is shown in multiple galleries at Spring Break.
I was immediately drawn to her depictions of the female body, rage, hunger, and most of all, chaos. Her paintings are intricate, following specific color themes and small symbols that require the viewer to come face to face with her work. Her lines are clean, every brush stroke intentional. The series Hellscapes follows different landscapes with the same subject: a female body, anonymous and lacking facial features, always presented with flowing long black hair.
Sitting outside her booth, I had a lovely interaction with Kay Seohyung Lee and was fortunate to learn more about her inspiration behind her complex works. Lee describes the chaos behind these paintings as a side effect of painting during the peak of Covid-19. Her painting, Nightfight, was inspired by a late night order of Dippin’ Dots. Pondering her own free-will, she ordered 35 boxes of Dippin’ Dots to her apartment. Upon arrival and a lack of freezer space to store the sweet treats, they started melting. The ice cream quickly turned into a gooey mess. These metamorphic viscous shapes inspired the overall feeling and subject of this painting, with multiple center points of female figures eating away at the ice cream forms and chaos ensuing around it. Hunger, famine, and small black cats are consistent themes through her Hellscapes series. She also mentioned that her work alludes to memes in our current culture, and inside jokes with her friend, such as including their beloved pets that only they will recognize. Her work delicately balances heavy subjects such as body image, yearning, violence, and her internal solitude as a Korean living in Philadelphia. Yet beyond these difficult topics, Lee creates her own worlds with an underlying unserious and humorous tone.
While her Hellscapes series presents repetitive themes, she discussed how she becomes bored of the same subject easily and noted that we can expect different subjects in her upcoming paintings. Lee is truly an up and coming artists, with her works displayed in galleries in Paris, Seoul, and Los Angeles, yet she is just beginning her artistic career. Painting whenever she is not lecturing at the University of Pennsylvania, her graduate school, we look forward to her future creative endeavors and recognizing her specific painting style in big galleries across the world.