Crafting Deliciously, Drawing Playfully
Jiwon Yu
Donghoon Rhee works with materials drawn from everyday life, shaping them into painted wooden sculptures, paper cuttings, and two-dimensional compositions. These ordinary subjects range from still lifes, a genre with a long-standing art historical tradition, to beloved cats and the dynamic movements of K-pop idols. What is particularly striking is that these subjects remain within intensely specific realms rather than connecting outward to some grand worldview or leading toward broader insights. The pleasure that comes from examining the forms, colors, textures, and weight of the works resists translation into any singular interpretation. It is almost as though, from the very beginning, what was being made or drawn was never the most important thing at all.
Having worked primarily in painting, Donghoon Rhee first turned to wood sculpture through a chance encounter, choosing the vase as his initial subject. At a moment when painting remained compelling but conveying meaning did not, and when it seemed as though no truly new painting could exist under the sun, Donghoon Rhee began carving wooden vases, “just as painters once practiced painting by using vases as still-life subjects.” This combination of a conventional motif and a material he was newly learning to work with provided a rationale for painting—in other words, a structural device through which artistic production could continue. Paradoxically, it was through this detour away from painting that painting itself could be redefined.
Flower Vase (2018) takes the form of a vase carved from Korean pine, yet it is completed in a deliberately rough state, as though it was never intended to approximate the object itself, remaining instead a “wood carving.” The surface, marked by the traces of material painstakingly removed piece by piece, not only lends the sculpture a compelling texture but also offers countless pictorial planes to Donghoon Rhee, who never ceases to be a painter even while carving wood. The painter’s task of creating a complete image upon a single canvas surface is thus transformed into a combination of choices distributed across scattered, minute surfaces: whether to accentuate or overlook the shadows of the three-dimensional form, and whether to conceal or reveal the wood grain by adjusting the density and thickness of the acrylic paint. Judging from the variations developed in works such as Flower Vase (2019), Cactus (2019), and Flower Vase (2020), these calculations must have been deeply pleasurable for a painter liberated from the question of “what to paint.” That pleasure is conveyed to me as well when I encounter these painted sculptures. Moving around them is less a phenomenological experience involving the whole body, or a distinctly “sculptural” mode of perception, than a visual activity akin to ceaselessly scanning a dynamic pictorial surface.
Paintings derived from these painted wooden sculptures appear to emerge from the perspective of a third-party observer who examines them with curiosity, as though viewing them from a certain distance, almost forgetting that they were made by the artist. They are paintings of sculptures rendered as if the flowerpots that served as their models had never actually been seen. The descriptions, particularly attentive to the tactile qualities of the sculptural surfaces, no longer register as flowerpots, or even as three-dimensional objects at all. Instead, they appear flattened, like a tapestry of adjacent green patches unfolding in continuous succession, or like cross-sections of proliferating masses arranged side by side, with any sense of depth effectively erased. Interestingly, the works recall Cubism. Yet this resemblance arises not from an attempt to dismantle and reconstruct three-dimensional forms through multiple viewpoints, but rather because the painted sculptures, as subjects of painting, remain more faithful to pictorial principles than to sculptural ones, as we have already seen. More than the organic forms of the sculptures themselves, what becomes compelling to observe and depict are the individual planes: the effects of acrylic paint unevenly resting upon or soaking into curved wooden surfaces rather than flat textile supports. In this sense, the artist never truly departed from painting, even while carving wood. It is perhaps through this persistence that a mode of painting emerged, one that actively feels its way across three-dimensional forms.
The same holds true even when the subject of depiction changes. Beginning in 2020, Donghoon Rhee turned his attention to the choreography of K-pop idols and the movements of cats. These subjects clearly differ from still lifes in that countless images of them are reproduced and circulated within a very short span of time. Yet here as well, a distinctly planar approach to three-dimensional form remains evident. In works such as Cat and Me (2021), Rollin’ (2022), and Next Level (2022), movement is rendered through techniques reminiscent of multiple-exposure photography or comics that layer several actions within a single frame to create the illusion of motion on a static surface. A leg that remains planted on the ground extends beneath a raised knee, while multiple hands wrap around and bend a torso. A cat brushing past the side of a reclining figure elongates along the trajectory of its movement, while five or more stroking hands are layered atop it. Continuous durations of time thus crystallize into discontinuous forms. Paintings derived from these more complex painted sculptures unfold across two or more canvases. As though the sculptures themselves had been wrapped in canvas and printed like relief prints, the paintings spread laterally across the scenes encountered while circling the sculptures twice. Rather than condensing the essential qualities of a subject, these pictorial surfaces, now infused with the temporal dimension of observation, openly reveal the tactile pleasure of looking and recording, without filtration.
Of course, the subjects Donghoon Rhee engages through painting actively resonate with the contemporary moment. There is ample room to interpret them as indicators of a cultural landscape in which K-pop, a total art form, has become a public arena generating shared experiences across generations, while companion animals have come to be regarded as members of the family and a generation has emerged that fills its homes with countless plants. Moreover, the texture of wood, a material long associated with the history of art, collides with the sleek images transmitted through equally sleek screens, achieving a form of contemporaneity by indirect means. Yet by developing a distinctive stylistic process and remaining deeply committed to the traditions of artistic media, the artist’s painting ultimately withdraws from investment in subject matter and conceptual concerns alike, turning instead toward the concrete and material realm.
The paper sculptures presented in Donghoon Rhee’s 2023 solo exhibition Light Choreography make it even more apparent that the artist’s acts of making and drawing are grounded in the properties of materials themselves, as well as in a close attention to their specific dynamics, precisely because they momentarily depart from previously established media and techniques. Much as Robert Morris sought, in Untitled (1967–1968), to eliminate authorial intention and rely entirely on the material properties of felt cloth surrendered to gravity, the artist’s paper sculptures draw upon the distinctive powers of visualization developed through painted wooden sculpture and its related paintings while remaining responsive to the characteristics of their materials. When using paper that bends, folds, or droops easily under the force of gravity rather than standing on its own, the artist layers multiple sheets to emphasize rhythms of curvature. When working with thick, coarse cardboard, however, the artist adopts a mode of painting closer to that used in the wooden sculptures, perhaps even suggesting that wood and paper ultimately share a common origin in the tree.
Let us return to the wooden sculptures. The 2025 Long Bird series captures birds in the moment of taking flight, preserving the accumulation of movement across time within wood. The warm, yellow-toned timber is carved more smoothly than in the earlier painted sculptures, and by dispensing with paint, the works no longer appear as multi-planar constructions but emerge instead as singular masses. Unlike earlier works, these sculptures seem to invite a bodily response before a visual one, eliciting an almost irresistible urge to touch them. Standing beside a sculpture roughly the height of the human body, one encounters forms that have transformed the passage of time into mass and volume. We can almost hold in our arms that very instant when a bird pushes off from the ground and begins to fly.
Perhaps this recent body of work appears markedly more “sculptural” than the earlier works; indeed, there are no corresponding paintings. A similar tendency can also be observed in the painted sculptures based on K-pop that Donghoon Rhee has developed over the past several years. Whereas earlier works retained traces of specific choreographic movements despite formal distortions, more recent works such as ETA (2024) and Drama (2024) leave them completely unrecognizable. These masses, which no longer follow the conventions of human bodily composition, seem less concerned with reproducing the choreographic movements indicated by their titles than with presenting the outcome of a hypothetical reconstruction of the artist’s own working process. In other words, one might imagine first creating a painted sculpture based on a signature movement from NewJeans’ “ETA,” then observing it from multiple angles to produce a painting, and finally using that painting as the model for yet another sculpture. Of course, this process is not literally carried out. Yet it is clear that the abstraction enacted in these works is deeply informed by the perspective developed through repeated movement between sculpture and painting, a perspective that disperses and reassembles surfaces from multiple viewpoints.
It is precisely this refusal to confine the work to any fixed trajectory, coupled with its continual cycles of experimentation and renewal, that makes Donghoon Rhee’s practice so compelling. In order to continue drawing while maintaining a painterly identity, or perhaps to convince oneself of the very necessity of doing so, Donghoon Rhee seeks out new materials and follows where they lead, guided by their properties without knowing the destination in advance. Along the way, a work may become a perceptive reinterpretation of artistic tradition or acquire an unexpected contemporary resonance. A three-dimensional form initially undertaken in pursuit of painting may, before one realizes it, come to exist as sculpture in its own right. Yet within this ongoing practice of material experimentation and technical reinvention, something may matter even more than such outcomes: the ability to retain the pleasure of making and the joy of drawing.
Before writing this essay, we met twice and spoke about what it means to live as a creative practitioner at this particular moment. Perhaps there are two paths to becoming an artist. One is to possess powerful and distinctive formal language. The other is to build a discourse grounded in sustained research on a particular subject. In other words, one is expected to be gifted either with the hand or with the mind. But if neither path seems readily available, is one destined to succumb to irreparable frustration? To create within today’s accelerated attention economy is, perhaps, not unlike caring for a companion animal or tending a houseplant: it requires continuously nurturing the very impulse to create. If one cannot find a subject capable of sustaining the desire to observe and draw, one must create that subject. And to create it, one must practice with new materials and tools. Artistic achievement, growth, and renewal may ultimately be nothing more than names we give to the persistence required to preserve the pleasure of making and the joy of drawing.
Jiwon Yu (Curator, Critic, Translator)
Jiwon Yu is a curator, critic, and translator based in Seoul, with an academic background in aesthetics. She was Assistant Curator of the 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale and Curator at Leeum Museum of Art. She is currently the co-director of YPC SPACE, an independent program and exhibition venue. Among her curated exhibitions are Infiltrators (SAPY, Seoul, 2025), 2024 Art Spectrum Dream Screen (Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024, co-curated), Kim Beom Solo Exhibition How to become a rock (Leeum Museum of Art, 2023, co-curated), ADOPT ADAPT (Hall1, Seoul, 2023), and Gravity Shower (N/A, Seoul, 2022). She is the author of How to Live/Buy Art: Around the New Space Movement (2024, Mati Books).
