Lee Ji-woo (born 1995) is a painter based in Seoul. She creates quiet landscapes inspired by scenes she encounters by chance in everyday life and fleeting moments of memory. Starting from personal experiences and recollections, her work explores the emotions and atmosphere embedded in daily life through familiar spaces and objects, creating scenes in which viewers can overlay their own memories and feelings.

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

Before I began preparing for art school entrance exams, I enjoyed plein-air drawing, observing and sketching directly from life outdoors. Although I lived near the city, the area around me was rich in natural scenery, and the time I spent there became an important sensory experience for me. I deeply loved the landscapes where urban buildings and nature coexisted—especially under the strong midday sunlight and the softer afternoon light. Expressing these scenes in watercolor was the most enjoyable and natural experience for me.

Those experiences eventually led me to pursue art more seriously, and I went on to major in Korean painting. Later, I entered graduate school and continued to develop my artistic practice through academic research while also teaching. During this time, I accumulated a wide range of experiences and knowledge, but the sensory impressions and emotional responses I felt in nature as a child have remained a fundamental root of my work.

Today, my work focuses on sharing how natural elements in our everyday lives can continue to hold meaning even within contemporary urban environments. In particular, capturing the beauty of nature within the city—especially moments when light settles onto the landscape—and sharing this sensory experience with viewers lies at the core of my practice.

Your work often transforms memories and fleeting impressions into visual stories. How do you approach turning intangible experiences into images?

When I encounter a landscape that moves me while walking in everyday life, I have a habit of pausing for a moment and capturing that scene with my camera. Just as one carefully observes a person for a long time when painting a portrait, I observe and render the impressions and expressions embedded in the landscape onto the canvas.

In Korean, there is a word “natbit,” which literally refers to the light cast on a person’s face. However, beyond its surface meaning, the word also contains nonverbal elements such as emotions, inner states, subtle moods, and expressions that arise from within a person. I approach landscapes in a similar way—reading what might be called their “natbit” within the scenes I encounter in everyday life.

If I continue to look at a scene for a while, the landscape sometimes seems to take on a face, as if it were looking back at me. I try to preserve the sensory impressions of that moment—the scent, the visual atmosphere, the tactile feeling of the air, as well as the sense of time and season—and later translate them onto the canvas.

In many ways, this process resembles painting a portrait. Rather than simply transferring memories and fleeting impressions into images, I attempt to transform intangible sensations into visual form, much like how a portrait can embody a person’s emotions and lived experiences.

What is your creative process like? Do you follow a routine or work spontaneously?

I tend to capture moments that catch my eye and keep them as images. Most of my paintings do not include people. Instead, they depict scenes that many people may have experienced at least once—such as the warmest, most pleasant moments of the day or quiet and secluded places where no one is around. I collect these images and later transfer them onto canvas according to my exhibition schedule. In other words, I gather materials spontaneously when inspiration strikes, and then structure my process around a more consistent routine.

Sometimes I use photographs directly as references, but I often edit and adjust the colors and textures to better reflect the emotions I felt and the mental images that came to mind before using them as references for my paintings.

I occasionally begin with a light sketch, but I also spend a day or two drawing on paper with colored pencils at a density similar to that of the final canvas. When I move to the canvas, I first create a thin underdrawing with diluted oil paint. Then I apply several layers using a mixture of paint, oil, and a medium containing fine sand particles. Finally, to express the light and textures I experienced, I repeatedly scratch into the surface with dry materials such as colored pencils, charcoal, and a palette knife to complete the work.

You describe your paintings as diaries or letters. How do you hope viewers connect with these personal narratives?

When I first began my artistic practice, the message I wanted to convey through my work was what I called “paintings that gently ask after one’s well-being in everyday life.” These days people rarely write handwritten letters, but I felt that my work was similar to the act of writing a letter on paper to share one’s thoughts and feelings. To write a letter, you need to pause for a moment and take the time to reflect on your own feelings.

In that sense, I hope my paintings can function like small “letters in the form of images,” offering viewers a brief moment of pause. Through the work, I hope people can naturally connect with their own memories and emotions and take a moment, however short, to reflect on their own inner feelings.

For me, the title of a work is similar to addressing its recipient, as in a letter. Naming each piece is a process I approach with great care—much like writing the opening greeting of a letter—taking time to find a simple and sincere expression that reflects the feeling of the work.

For example, there is a piece titled Toward Brightness. When I first drew the original version with colored pencils last year, the scene itself did not feel particularly compelling to me. Later, when I had the opportunity to exhibit at Asan Medical Center in the spring, I began to think about how the people there might feel when encountering the work. I hoped that the painting might help them move toward a brighter state of mind, and with that intention, I reworked the piece.

During the exhibition, I noticed that many patients tended to stay in front of this particular painting for a long time. At first, I had not realized it, but I began to understand that the scene I had depicted could resonate deeply with people. I was especially moved when I heard that one patient had stood before the painting for quite a while and quietly wiped away tears. In that moment, I felt that paintings truly have the power to touch people’s hearts—that the light within the image had somehow reached them emotionally.

Since that experience, I have come to value even more the process of carefully giving each work a title that aligns with the message and emotion I hope to convey.

How do your personal experiences and identity influence your art?

My personal experiences and identity are closely intertwined with my work. At times, I feel that my emotions and thoughts are reflected so directly in my paintings that exhibiting them can feel like presenting something as intimate as a diary. In that sense, I believe there is an instinctive connection between my life and my artistic practice—one that cannot be fabricated.

I think memory does not preserve every moment of our lives equally. Rather, it becomes a story made up of the scenes we consciously or unconsciously choose to remember. Even when people live through the same period of time, the moments and emotions they recall are often very different. For this reason, the scenes in my paintings usually begin not with dramatic events, but with small moments in everyday life where my gaze comes to rest.

These might include subtle images such as a breeze that carries the hint of a changing season, a chair warmed by sunlight with a cup of coffee beside it, or the shadow of leaves falling across the ground. Such scenes are not simply records of reality; they are images reconstructed through the overlap of the emotions and memories I experienced in those moments.

My personal experiences and identity shape the way I look at everyday scenes and influence the emotional tone and atmosphere that emerge within them. Ultimately, although my work begins with personal memories and feelings, I hope that once these experiences are translated into landscapes and objects, they become scenes in which many viewers can see their own memories and emotions reflected.

What projects are you currently working on, and what can we expect from you in the future?

At the moment, I am continuing my artistic practice while conducting research and writing my thesis in graduate school, gradually expanding both the depth and scope of my work. Alongside my academic life, I am also preparing for an exhibition and an art fair scheduled for this summer, while steadily developing paintings based on scenes from everyday life.

Looking at the bigger picture, I would like to experiment with a wider range of materials and techniques and explore the themes of my work in greater depth. At the same time, I hope to expand my artistic world without losing the initial perspective and sensibility that guided me when I first began. As I continue working, there are moments when I realize that I may have drifted away from my original intentions. Whenever that happens, I try to return to the feeling I had when I first exhibited my work and reconnect with that original sense of purpose.

My paintings do not tell stories through long narratives, but I hope they become scenes that anyone can comfortably look at in any setting. Beyond simply being images that catch the eye, I hope they remain in the viewer’s mind for a long time and gradually unfold into personal narratives within each viewer’s memory.

Text and photo courtesy of Lee Ji-woo

Website: https://paintingletter.myportfolio.com/
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