chayunlee

Artist Statement

Chayun’s work begins by recalling memories and extracting the colors embedded within them.

These colors are then restructured and reinterpreted into a new visual language.

Memory does not surface all at once.

Faint sensations, blurred images, and forgotten fragments of emotion accumulate over time—until one day, they quietly bloom into color.

She captures that color and carefully layers it, one by one, onto Hanji, traditional Korean paper.

The color layers in her work do not reveal themselves in a single moment, just as memories do not return in complete form.

They are like fragments retrieved from somewhere deep within the mind, gradually overlapping along emotional currents.

These layers eventually converge into a single sensory experience—a visual landscape of feeling.

The surface of hanji becomes more than a compositional base; it is a silent record of inner emotional depth.

A distinctive feature of her work is its dual-sided structure, in which two different colors appear within a single piece depending on the viewer’s perspective.

As the angle shifts, so do the colors—interacting subtly to evoke new sensations.

This structure reveals the nature of memory not as singular or fixed, but as a layered phenomenon that transforms through time, emotion, and point of view.

The coexistence of different colors within a shared space reminds us that a single memory often holds multiple, overlapping emotional states.

Her recent work draws from memories of living in Dubai.

The city offered her both unfamiliarity and familiarity, silence and richness, all at once.

Its sun, though intense, gently melted the heart; the soft breeze, the heat of a foreign climate—these elements reached her like emotional stimuli, awakening her senses and guiding her back into creation.

She translates the language of memory into color, and quietly allows it to settle on Hanji.

Through this process, she hopes to create a contemplative space—one that gently taps into others’ memories and emotions as well.