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 with narrative-based works rooted in personal history and everyday observation, he established a distinctive pictorial language that moves fluidly between figuration and abstraction, drawing on cinematic and photographic modes of vision while emphasizing the physicality of paint and gestural brushwork.
Lee first gained international recognition in 2006 when he was selected for the Castellón International Painting Prize in Spain. His entry, Cool Painting (2003), was a video work capturing an electric fan placed in front of his autobiographical oil painting, Conception Dream (2003), thereby extending the conventional boundaries of painting and experimenting with how images mutate across different media. That same year, as an artist-in-residence at the MMCA Changdong Residency, he presented the Inter-view project, combining video interviews, photographs, and paintings to record the people he encountered, drawing significant attention from both critics and the public.
While producing 120 portraits for Inter-view, Lee became deeply interested in how individuality is remembered through tactile experience. This inquiry culminated in his acclaimed Cactus series, where bold and varied brushwork—including scratching, tapping, and layering—evokes the tangible texture of the plant rather than merely describing its appearance. Through this series, Lee shifted his focus from visual resemblance to the tactile experience of presence. Isolated against neutral backgrounds, the cacti function less as botanical specimens and more as portrait-like presences with distinct individual character.
Moving from intimate subjects, Lee expanded his gaze to landscapes he photographed himself, such as deserts, wetlands, and nocturnal scenes. Using photography as a medium, he continuously investigates the dynamic relationship between touch, vision, and pictorial space. This painterly exploration becomes even more refined in his Blow-up series, begun in 2023, where extreme close-ups of specific landscape fragments bring the subtle surface textures of nature and the mechanics of representation into an expansive painterly field.
Lee is currently a professor of Western Painting at Ewha Womans University. His work is included in major public and institutional collections, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul Museum of Art, and Deji Art Museum in Nanjing.
