Lee Jinhee (b. 1982) received her BFA and MFA in Fine Art–Painting and Drawing from the Academy of Art University in the United States, and earned a PhD in Fine Arts from Sookmyung Women’s University. Working primarily in oil, she explores traditional techniques and examines the possibilities and limits of representation. Through a repeated process of painting, erasing, and building up images again, she brings to the surface the materiality and time that accumulate on the canvas. In this process, she focuses on moments when familiar everyday objects shift slightly and return as something unfamiliar.
After completing her MFA, she exhibited across the United States and in the United Kingdom through exhibitions and competitions. She was selected several times for the Oil Painters of America National Juried Exhibition and Western Regional Juried Exhibition, was named a Finalist three times in the Art Renewal Center International ARC Salon, and received 3rd Place in the National Oil and Acrylic Painters’ Society International Juried Exhibition. Following her first solo exhibition at 625 Sutter Gallery in San Francisco in 2010, she returned to Korea and has continued her practice with solo exhibitions including STILL (Gallery IS, Seoul, 2019) and VEILED (Hori Factory, Seoul, 2020).