Future Memories:
Jeewi Lee on the Transformation of the Past

Please introduce yourself briefly.
I’m Jeewi Lee, a visual artist focusing on installation, sculpture, image-based series, and site-specific works. I was born in 1987 in Seoul, grew up between South Korea and Germany, and I now live in Berlin.

My artistic practice centers on questions of traces, transience, and memories embedded in materials, as well as the relationship between space, time, and human presence. The idea of the “trace” is fundamental to my work, whether understood as a footprint, a memory, a historical layer, or a material remnant. Traces are often minimal, yet they carry their own narrative. They bring past and present together, presence and absence as well. This simultaneity is what intrigues me most.

In your work, the key themes of memory, time, traces, and transience appear again and again. What was the personal or artistic starting point that led you to engage with these topics so continuously?
These themes are closely tied to my biography, to migration, movement, and living between different places. Memory is never static; it shifts and condenses. I am interested in how materials can make these processes visible, how time inscribes itself, how traces remain or disappear, and how absence can be just as present as presence.

Materials and spaces hold stories, often in subtle ways. A trace in sand or an imprint in soap is evidence of an action that has taken place. Their indexical quality, the direct connection to the event that produced them, fascinates me. Traces are silent witnesses that speak of time.

Roland Barthes describes this quality in photography as the “that-has-been,” the certainty that something truly existed. Traces carry exactly this kind of authenticity; they are quiet witnesses. Walter Benjamin wrote about the “aura” of original objects, the uniqueness that cannot be separated from their history and their specific “here and now.”

This is exactly what interests me: the moment between presence and absence, when something is in the process of disappearing but has not yet completely gone. It is a suspended state that feels very close to my own experience.

As someone who has lived between cultures and places, I developed an early sensitivity to fragmentation. Frequent moves in Korea and Germany, periods of uprooting and return, have shaped the way I perceive the world. Migration means that memory is repeatedly interrupted. Later, I understood why “nomadic” objects like grains of sand or cuttlebones resonate with me emotionally. I recognized something of my own biography in them.

You have spent time not only in Korea and Germany but also in the United States. How have these different cultural contexts and educational environments influenced your visual language and way of working?
The different cultural and pedagogical contexts have shaped my practice in very meaningful ways. In Korea, I am inspired by everyday materials, natural phenomena, and philosophical concepts such as Taoism, as well as ideas like Jeong, Inyeon, and Han. In Germany, my thinking became more conceptual and process-oriented, while in the United States I found the space to reflect more deeply on my identity and biography.

I believe that this transcultural experience has influenced my visual language and led to a kind of visual reduction. I look for a form of expression that is not overly determined by a single culture, yet can resonate across different contexts. Minimalism, for me, is not a style but a necessity. It is a language that creates space for multiple readings.

Jeewi Lee's Projects and Her Artistic Universe

Even though all of your works are surely meaningful to you, which three or four pieces would you personally want to introduce to our followers — whether as key works or as pieces that marked a turning point in your practice? Could you also briefly explain how these works came about and what questions you were exploring as an artist at the time?
This is a difficult choice, but I would name the following works:

FUNDAMENT (Foundation) (2014)
My graduation project at the UdK was a major turning point in my practice: a piece of studio floor more than two meters wide, covered over the years with paint, stains, and scratches. It became an archive of my entire time as a student. When I left the university, I felt as if the ground had been pulled out from under me, so I took my own ground with me.

The work explored the question of how absence can take form, and how the past can develop a physical and experiential presence. In this sense, Fundament became a metaphorical work that encapsulates the essence of my years at the university while also laying the groundwork for my artistic practice moving forward. Past Tense (2016–today):
This series builds on Fundament but shifts the focus to Korea. I work with Hanji Jangpan, a traditional Korean paper flooring from old houses, which I often receive in exchange for installing a new floor. I am fascinated by how time inscribes itself into the material: floor heating, sunlight, marks left by furniture, traces of burning. Korean everyday culture is literally stored in the surface.

For me, these used papers reveal a painterly, graphic, and almost photographic potential. They are quiet witnesses of time and the body, of intimacy and memory. By directing the viewer’s gaze toward the floor as a Korean artist, I also provoke a metaphorical look back at my own roots. Vor·wurf (Accusation) (2021):
A three-part installation about Korean culture and my family history, particularly my grandfather, who died before I was born yet continues to live on through stories. To confront the past and learn more about this man, described as courageous but also authoritarian and patriarchal, I traveled to his now-abandoned house in the village of Ha-Dong and eventually transferred his room to Berlin.

I carefully removed the wallpaper from the walls and ceiling and transformed it into an installation that hangs from the exhibition space like an unfolded cube net. For me, walls function like a second skin. They surrounded my grandfather and now act as an archive of his life.

While removing the wallpaper, I repeatedly found personal remnants hidden between the many layers, invisible until then because they had been covered over: small paintings, talismans, and tiny scraps of paper with written intentions.
The second part of the work consists of everyday objects found in the house, ranging from historical to contemporary items, which I cast in bronze. These objects serve as witnesses to time, having hung on the walls for decades. I also created a video piece in which the bronze sculptures appear as bluescreen elements using the ultramarine blue color of the exhibition space.

The title “Vorwurf” (“원망”) describes an echo, a trace that emerges from something that came before. Encounter (Future Past Tense) (2023–today):
This work is based on cuttlebones, the internal shells of cuttlefish that drift through the ocean for months after the animal’s death, collecting traces of their journey. They embody time and the memories of their passage until they eventually wash ashore and encounter us.

I am fascinated by the simultaneity of fragility and resilience in this material. These delicate objects have survived currents and surf almost intact. They embody the nomadic qualities that also remind me of my childhood memories along the Korean coast.

For the installation, I electroplated the cuttlebones with copper in order to preserve them and the traces they carry. Their futuristic appearance creates a dialogue between past and future, between an archaic natural form and a speculative aesthetic.  

Materials, site-specific installations, and artistic processes

In your work, everyday materials with layered meanings often appear. Do you choose these materials primarily from a conceptual starting point, or do they emerge through chance encounters and discoveries? Could you also describe how an idea develops from the first impulse to a concrete installation?
For me, it is an interplay. Sometimes a conceptual idea comes first, but often a work begins with a material encounter, an observation, or a moment of fascination. Materials such as sand, ash, soap, or paper floors carry time, history, and cultural meaning within them. Through experimentation and site-specific research, ideas begin to take shape, and the process stays open. The material plays an active role in determining the direction of the work.

Soap interests me, for example, because of its ambivalence. It is an everyday substance, yet symbolically charged, a material that dissolves and disappears. Historically, it was made from ash, which itself represents both an end point and the beginning of new life. Soap suggests cleansing and the erasure of traces. Ash is the last solid, tangible state before something vanishes, a kind of final stage that is also fertile when used as fertilizer, containing the potential for new growth.
Sand fascinates me because each grain holds an immense amount of time, distance, and memory. It was once part of a mountain or rock that, over millions of years, transformed into a single grain. Strictly speaking, sand is defined only by its size. Under the microscope you find shell fragments, minerals, or microplastics. Every coastline has its own chromatic and material history.

My process usually begins with observation and experimentation. The actual installation then takes shape on site. There is always a moment when material, space, and concept come together. Many aspects cannot be predetermined in the studio. The genius loci, the spatial conditions, and the history of the location all play a decisive role.

In your work, site‑specific installations seem to play a very important role. Pieces such as Impianto, Einschlag (Impact), Residuum, or Plate were each developed in completely different spatial contexts, whether inside buildings, outdoors, or in coastal landscapes. What criteria do you use when choosing a location for a new project?
For me, the site is never just a backdrop but an active part of the work. Projects arise either through invitations or through chance encounters with spaces whose history and tension inspire me. I always immerse myself in the local context, and that often leads quite naturally to the form the work takes. My own biography, living between different places, certainly plays a role as well.

One example is Einschlag (Impact) (2018), created in the former air‑raid bunker BNKR in Munich. Before the exhibition, a hollow steel sphere was hurled with great force against the concrete walls. The deformed wrecking ball then hung in the space, making both the brutality of the bunker’s history and our contemporary handling of such sites visible. Another example is Impianto, a work I began during my Villa Romana Fellowship in Florence. Restoration work on historic facades and sculptures inspired me to make the “flaws” of a building visible. At the Villa Romana house, I filled chipped and damaged areas with precisely cut pieces of marble, highlighting the traces of the past instead of concealing them.

Frottage, lithographs, and simple repetitive patterns

Work in the form of frottages or prints appears repeatedly alongside your installations. Are these two‑dimensional works an extension of your installations, or do they function as an independent system of recording and archiving?
Both. The frottages and prints are independent works, but they are also part of a larger whole. Frottage, for me, is a technique of recording traces. It makes surfaces and structures visible that might otherwise be overlooked, and it expands the questions posed in my installations, questions about absence, materiality, and memory.

One example is Inzision (Incision) (2018). Along the 38th parallel in South Korea, a place that remains deeply tied to the painful history of the country's division, I selected trees whose bark functions as a silent witness to that history. Using the Takbon technique, I transferred their surfaces onto Hanji paper with a cotton ball and Meok ink. The resulting black-and-white images resemble portraits or fingerprints of these trees. Alongside the prints, I also created an artist book in which I wrote diary-like entries about my journey, including encounters and conversations. In the exhibition, the Inzision works were shown together with a large-scale floor installation (Fraktur), made of white and dark gravel. A similar approach appears in Drape of Wisdom (2020–2021), my series of Takbon rubbings taken from an 850‑year‑old baobab tree in Senegal. The work connects African and Asian forms of knowledge on an abstract level. The Takbon technique was traditionally used to copy information embedded in wood carvings or gravestones. I wanted to create abstract portraits of this “tree of life” and record its role as a keeper of stories and decisions on paper. Recurring simple forms and compositions built around emptiness intentionally leave space for interpretation. What role does reduction play for you?
Reduction is not only a formal strategy for me, but also an ethical attitude, a counterbalance to the visual overstimulation of our time. It creates space, both literally and metaphorically.

Aesthetically, I am interested in how much meaning can be carried by a minimal gesture, how powerful a simple form can become when placed with precision. Repetition intensifies this effect and allows the eye to slow down and look more closely. Conceptually, I aim for openness and invitation. My works are meant to allow for different readings and to be completed through the associations of the viewer. Emptiness and fullness stand side by side with equal value.

I also like working with materials that contain ambiguity. One example is Ott (urushi lacquer). When liquid it is toxic, but once dried it becomes an everyday, durable material in Korean culture, and it cures only in warm, humid conditions. These in‑between states, between fragility and strength, visibility and invisibility, inspire me. They remind me of forms of coexistence that I connect with an Asian philosophical perspective.

GASAG Art Prize 2026

Congratulations on winning the GASAG Art Prize 2026. Which aspects of your artistic practice do you think resonated most with the jury? And could you give us a brief insight into the direction of the new installation you will present at the Berlinische Galerie as part of the award?
Thank you very much. At the Berlinische Galerie this coming September, I will continue developing the theme of sand and further expand my works Fragments (sand sculptures) and Field of Fragments (sand paintings). At the same time, new pieces are taking shape through experiments with new materials that I am conducting together with my collaborator Phillip C. Reiner. The exhibition will also include collaborations with Thorsten Kosellek (light) and Jared Meier‑Klodt (soundscape). I am very much looking forward to it.

Contemporary Art and AI

Your work is deeply rooted in materiality, traces, and sensory experience, which are areas that cannot easily be replaced by AI. How do you perceive the increasing presence of AI technologies in contemporary art? And how do you personally approach it: do you use AI as a creative tool, as a research instrument, or more as a subject of critical reflection, or do you intentionally keep your distance from it?
This is an important question. I see my work as a conscious counter‑movement to increasing digitalization. The physical encounter with materials, the presence within a space, and the tactile dimension of experience are aspects that AI cannot replace.

At the same time, I follow AI developments with interest, because they raise significant questions about creativity, authorship, and the role of the human in the creative process. Personally, I use AI mostly for research or for organizational tasks. For my Field of Fragments project, I also worked extensively with technology together with Phillip C. Reiner and ZEISS Messtechnik GmbH to scan sand grains using X‑ray microscopy and create 3D models. In that context, the scientific and technological component played a very central role.

Still, what remains most essential for me is that an emotional and poetic core is what makes art meaningful. I do not currently use AI as a creative tool, since my practice is grounded in the physical handling of materials. But I am open to it if it ever becomes a starting point for a future artwork.

Plans and Inspiration

Are there any long‑term artistic or research‑driven projects you hope to continue developing in the coming years? And if you were to exhibit in Korea again, are there specific spaces or locations you would particularly like to work with or explore artistically?
Over the long term, I want to deepen my exploration of time, transience, and memory, and to investigate new material and spatial constellations. I am interested in how memories are stored, retold, and transformed over time. I also find myself increasingly drawn to traditional Korean knowledge, rituals, and forms of wisdom, many of which are waiting in my notebook to be pursued further.

I think a lot about “future memories.” We can only shape the future if we truly understand the past. Every ending contains a beginning, much like the image of the phoenix or the Chinese firebird. This cycle of destruction and rebirth shapes not only nature but also our personal experiences. What we do today will resonate in the future.

As for exhibiting in Korea again, it would be deeply meaningful for me to work there once more. I am particularly drawn to places with complex histories of transformation, such as industrial wastelands, zones between city and landscape, or traditional architecture where a different sense of time and a different relationship to space can be felt.


Interview & Concept: Sohee Shin
Editing & Proofreading: Leslie Klatte
Korean Translation: Sohee Shin
English Translation: Leslie Klatte