Lee Kwang-Ho (b. 1967, Chungcheongbuk-do, Korea) received his B.F.A. in Painting and M.F.A. in Printmaking from Seoul National University.
Beginning in graduate school, Lee developed narrative-based paintings rooted in personal history and everyday observation. He soon established a distinctive pictorial language that moves fluidly between figuration and abstraction, drawing on cinematic and photographic ways of seeing while emphasizing the physicality of paint and gesture.
Lee first gained international recognition in 2006 when he was selected for the Castellón International Painting Prize in Spain. His submission, Cool Painting (2003), combined an autobiographical oil painting, Conception Dream (2003), with an electric fan positioned directly in front of the canvas, extending painting beyond its conventional boundaries and testing how images shift across different media. That same year, he presented Inter-view at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Changdong Residency, bringing together interview videos, photographs, and paintings to examine memory and social identity.
While producing 120 painted portraits for Inter-view, Lee became increasingly interested in how individuality can be remembered through touch. This inquiry led to his acclaimed Cactus series, in which varied brushwork—including scratching, tapping, and layering—evokes the tactile qualities of the plant rather than simply describing its appearance. Through this body of work, Lee shifted his attention from visual resemblance toward the tactile experience of presence. Isolated against blank backgrounds, the cacti are presented less as botanical specimens than as portrait-like presences with distinct individual character.
From these intimate subjects, Lee gradually expanded his focus to landscapes that he photographed himself, including deserts, wetlands, and nocturnal scenes. Working from these photographs, he continues to investigate the relationship between touch, vision, and pictorial space. This inquiry is further developed in the Blow-up series, begun in 2023, in which magnified fragments of landscape transform subtle surface textures into expansive painterly fields, allowing the tactile movement of the brush to register the physical presence of nature.
Lee is currently a professor in the Department of Western Painting at Ewha Womans University. His work is held in the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul Museum of Art, and Deji Art Museum, Nanjing. Grounded in a sustained engagement with painting as a tactile and perceptual practice, Lee explores how painting can generate a tangible sense of presence.
