Artist
Na Young Lee
Na Young Lee (이나영) is a London-based artist whose practice explores the unstable threshold between emergence and disappearance. Approaching visibility as an unfolding event rather than a fixed condition, she investigates how presence and absence coexist on the painted surface. Lee is currently completing her MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, and has exhibited in the UK and South Korea.
Her paintings evolve through shifting relationships in which form and ground, visible and invisible, continually exchange roles. Working with layered pigments and oils, she develops surfaces where colour appears singular yet is built from subtle flows that resist perceptual certainty. Forms arise not as predetermined images but through a dialogue between material contingency and artistic response.
Informed by phenomenological and posthuman thought, Lee considers painting as a site of intra-action—where material, environment, and perception co-emerge. Rather than presenting fixed images, her work invites viewers to inhabit the moment before visibility stabilises, when the unseen begins to take form.
Artworks
This work is constructed through the gradual accumulation of thin layers on canvas. Through repeated applications and concealments, the artist compresses multiple layers of time and space into a single pictorial plane. The painting operates not merely as an image, but as a field of depth shaped by duration.
A central concern lies in the disruption and reconstruction of edges. Forms emerge only to dissolve again, occupying the unstable threshold between appearance and disappearance. Elements that appear to function as foreground simultaneously shift into background, challenging fixed hierarchies within the composition. The ground is not passive; it holds latent presence and potential.
Informed by the idea that relationships precede fixed entities, the work considers how forces remain interconnected even beyond perceptual visibility. Meaning is imagined to reside within subtle gaps—unresolved spaces that resist full articulation. These intervals reflect both the limits of human perception and the persistent desire to grasp what exceeds clarity. The layered surface becomes a record of this ongoing negotiation with the indefinable.
Power of Subconscious, 2025
Oil on fabric, 81.5 x 61.5 cm
The Moment of Discovery, 2025
Oil on linen, 200 x 180 cm
This work explores the balance between the organic movement of scattered paint and the artist’s deliberate intervention on a large canvas. Accidental traces are sometimes preserved, while at other moments the surface is rubbed, blurred, or redefined to sharpen its presence. The process unfolds as an ongoing negotiation between control and acceptance.
The boundary between abstraction and semi-abstraction remains fluid. Emerging forms resist fixed meaning; they may evoke familiarity while remaining open to multiple interpretations. Though individual elements appear separate, they are subtly interconnected, guiding the viewer’s gaze along invisible trajectories across the surface. Rather than presenting a defined narrative, the painting operates as a visual diary in which sensation and reflection converge.
Conceptually, the work originates from a question about the human position within time. While daily life is often experienced from a near-sighted, human-centered perspective, the present moment exists within a broader continuum between past and future. The painting reflects on the latent forces shaping historical transformation and considers how such energies may already be sensed within ordinary experience. It foregrounds the dynamic charge of the present—an unfolding potential that may be reinterpreted over time.