Artist

Soo Hyun Lee

@todayisoohyun

Soo Hyun Lee is a South Korean artist based in London, working across painting, performance, and video installation. Her practice explores how emotional and social values—such as care, shame, resistance, and love—shape both personal and collective identity. Through her work, Lee visualises the fragile boundaries between tenderness and violence, revealing how intimacy can nurture yet consume.

In her recent series I have seen this coming and My soft hands became a sword one day, she reimagines vulnerability as a form of resistance. Her characters, drawn from emotionally charged relationships, inhabit transformative spaces where softness turns into power and delicacy becomes defiance.

Influenced by Korean feminist movements and her lived experience as a bilingual Asian woman in London, Lee uses the friction between languages and cultures to explore displacement, identity, and belonging.

Recent exhibitions include My soft hands became a sword one day (Solo, Sothu, Zurich, 2025), Malerei (AKKU Kunstplattform, Luzern, 2025), Daphne’s Daughters (MEY Gallery, Los Angeles, 2025), and K-Women: Celebrating Korean Female Artists (Kingston Museum, London, 2024–2025).