Peering into the Haze of Taboo and Desire
Jinshil Lee
“I want to talk about the things that exist in our lives but are treated as though they do not exist, hidden beneath a cover or behind a closed door. They are close at hand, yet for one reason or another remain difficult to speak about. I intend to bring them out one by one.” As this remark suggests, what continually rises and drifts through Eunsil Lee’s paintings are precisely these concealed things. One might wonder whether giving form, through the medium of Korean painting, to the lives of women living in Korean society is in itself such a secretive or delicate undertaking. Yet Lee’s paintings have consistently brought forth realities and desires that are rarely spoken aloud and often remain invisible, realities and desires of remarkable density.
These paintings, which Eunsil Lee has produced since 2008, at times take the form of East Asian architectural structures and anecdotal scenes, and at others appear as dreamlike, quasi-landscape paintings. Yet at the center of them all, “the sexual” is always presented as an undeniable reality. Sexual acts between men and women (or male and female animals) appear openly within folkloric landscapes; elsewhere, genitalia forms emerge discreetly among pale natural motifs, or body parts are brought into the foreground through an extremely close visual perspective. In this way, Eunsil Lee’s paintings, working through the formal language of Korean painting, reveal the realities of femininity and sexuality. More specifically, they bring to the surface the sexual repression, constraints, and traumas imposed upon cisgender heterosexual women within the structure of Korean patriarchy.
Few would dispute that the point at which Eunsil Lee’s work shines most subtly lies in its articulation of the contemporary realities of femininity and sexuality through the framework of tradition. Her paintings, which often unfold through anecdotal scenes and an earthy sensibility that expose the assumptions of normalcy and happiness embedded within the traditional Korean family model, are particularly capable of evoking feelings of trauma, hurt, and disappointment for Korean women. These painful sensations arise not simply from what is depicted. They seem to emerge from the paintings themselves: from images that magnify emotional and bodily surfaces as though viewed through a magnifying glass, and from the ambiguous, mist-like spaces unfolding across jangji paper (thick traditional Korean paper)—spaces that quietly evoke unease and uncertainty. Furthermore, these paintings evoke not merely a sense of discomfort surrounding the sexual realm but also feelings associated with wounds and trauma, while simultaneously cultivating a distinctive East Asian sensibility toward sexuality. Particularly striking are the obsessive yet delicate depictions of bloodshot skin and veins in the Edge Heart (2019) series; the scenes in the Concealed Ovulation (2019) series where natural forms such as waterfalls and valleys transform into vaginas in the act of giving birth; and the tiger-tail hybrids that convey the dynamism of penetrating phalluses or the dazzling sensuality of copulation. Together, they reveal chaos and eroticism on an altogether different register.
Since 2020, increasingly blurred and elusive bodily fragments have begun to occupy Eunsil Lee's canvases. In works such as That Day (2021), fragmentary forms whose identity is unclear, whether animal fur or human body hair, are interwoven with waterfalls, waves, and sprays of water appearing in the background. Folds, grooves, and other features that appear to belong to the body seem to transform into the dynamics of dispersed particles, like smoke or clouds drifting through space. The overall atmosphere of these paintings became increasingly fluid yet still, ambiguous yet not entirely abstract, evoking a peculiar sense of mystery. At a certain point, however, beginning with works such as the Unstable Dimension (2021) series, it is no longer the body’s exterior that comes into view, but anatomical organs rendered with greater clarity and definition. Illustrations of organs that seem to have emerged directly from a medical textbook—cranial structures spinal cords, cochleae, and kidneys—traverse hazy East Asian settings and indistinct backgrounds. When three-dimensional architectural perspectives are superimposed onto the picture plane, this sense of disjunction and opacity becomes even more pronounced. Confronted with such increasingly polarized compositions, one cannot help but wonder what it is that Eunsil Lee ultimately wishes to say, or what scene it is that she truly wishes to reveal.
In short, Eunsil Lee has continually reconfigured the repression and entanglements of sexuality embedded within Korean patriarchy through anatomical and endoscopic ways of seeing, while at the same time constructing a curious sense of three-dimensional spatial vision upon the material surface of Korean painting. These scenes, which build reality as a three-dimensional structure and psychology as an interior domain, may be understood as layered perspectives that are at once architectural and inward-looking. To be frank, it is difficult to say with certainty how fully the subjects that concern her—female embodiment, sexuality, desire, and trauma—ultimately reach the viewer after passing through such complex and experimental layers. One thing, however, is clear. The landscape she treats as a form of “inner space,” together with the three-dimensional corporeality she constructs through the pigments of East Asian painting, seem less concerned with anecdotal or situational description than with approaching, ever more closely and intimately, the recurring memories and lived experiences of women.
In Eunsil Lee’s recent work, such extreme close-ups and endoscopic or anatomical forms have become even more pronounced. The imagery, rendered with an almost microscopic level of detail while radiating the darkness associated with endoscopic vision, has opened up an entirely new set of formal possibilities, particularly in the snake paintings that first began appearing last year. In works such as Mind Full (2024), the coiled form of a snake recalls yet another drama of entangled desire and constraint, echoing the earlier paintings in which intertwined tiger tails evoked similarly conflicted states. With neither head nor tail revealed, the tightly coiled serpent and its shimmering scales evoke a different register of chaos, confinement, and madness.
Yet even in these snake paintings, Eunsil Lee’s distinctive endoscopic gaze remains unmistakable. A closer look at the serpentine forms reveals that they resemble the contours of a human brain. Whether depicting naked male and female bodies, unabashedly rendered genitalia, or moiré-like landscapes, Eunsil Lee has consistently been concerned with desire. In this regard, the appearance of the snake, one of the most enduring symbols of desire, seems a natural development in her practice. As is well known, the image of the snake has long occupied a central place in Western symbolic systems. Across mythology, religion, and art, it has repeatedly appeared as an emblem of desire, the temptation of taboo, and, more broadly, a symbol of sexual impulse. In the Book of Genesis, the serpent is depicted as the being that offers Eve the “forbidden fruit,” simultaneously bringing humanity knowledge, pleasure, and the Fall. The serpent thus becomes both the embodiment of temptation and the mediator of humanity’s desire to transgress divine order—that is, its longing for forbidden knowledge. Moreover, as Sigmund Freud argued that the serpent, like other elongated objects and certain animals, functions in dream–thought as a symbol of the phallus, the snake has long served in Western culture as a representation of sexual impulse and desire, owing to its form and movement. Beyond this, the serpent signifies not only transformation through the shedding of its skin but also the power of endless recurrence and self-renewal. This symbolism is perhaps most clearly embodied in the figure of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its own tail, a motif originating in ancient Greek mythology.
Meanwhile, in East Asia, and particularly within Korean tradition, the snake has occupied an ambivalent position: feared as a potentially dangerous creature, yet also revered as a guardian spirit that protects the household and its wealth, and even as a bringer of abundance and fertility. Native Korean snakes—including the Korean rat snake, the steppe rat snake, and various vipers—were not creatures confined to remote mountains; they often inhabited the spaces around human dwellings, and sometimes even the dwellings themselves. Against this layered symbolic backdrop, one begins to wonder what exactly the headless, coiled snakes of Eunsil Lee’s paintings, adorned with seductive colors and surfaces, are meant to signify. According to the artist, one thing these snakes express is “ugly desire.” Yet because such desire is something we can also recognize within ourselves—something at once dangerous and alluring—the paintings seek to evoke the contradictions through which ugliness and beauty become entangled. Indeed, the densely applied blue-green pigments on jangji paper and the subtly shifting patterns of the snakes are at once uncanny and beautiful. However, when these forms take on the shape of a human brain or evoke other anatomical structures, their straightforwardness can at times diminish their ambivalent and mysterious allure.
Eunsil Lee has often spoken of how the shocks and traumas encountered throughout life have served as powerful sources of inspiration. She has suggested that the works currently in progress are likewise connected to a series of traumatic experiences. Even in their preliminary sketches, one can already see clusters of blue waves, whirlpools, blue haze, and swirling currents of blue-green pigment gathering across the surface. The artist has said that she hopes to address childbirth in her paintings before those memories fade further. Not as an occasion of blessing, however, but as a kind of open secret—one that has brought pain and trauma to many women. As the works remain unfinished, it is difficult to say more at this stage. One can only wait with anticipation to see how these forms and sensations will ultimately unfold.
Most importantly, childbirth, as a subject at once acute and deeply sensitive, may well transform the horizon of female empathy that Eunsil Lee’s paintings have long cultivated. At the same time, childbirth is undeniably a difficult subject, not only at the level of painting as a formal practice but also within feminist discourse. Childbirth cannot be reduced to sexuality, bodily autonomy, or the mythology of motherhood, for the conditions that shape this experience constitute an extraordinarily complex and multifaceted terrain. In particular, pregnancy and childbirth, often described as forms of “sexual reproduction,” remain among the most contested issues, shaped by generational differences as well as by disability, class, and lived experience. Childbirth belongs not to the sphere of production traditionally associated with men’s waged labor, but to the realm of reproduction and reproductive value. Above all, reproductive rights have long occupied a central place in discussions surrounding women’s bodily health and autonomy. Sex, contraception, pregnancy, abortion, and childbirth function neither as natural obligations imposed upon women nor as entirely free choices. Rather, they are bound up with countless social conditions and contexts, and they do not present themselves as equally available options to all women.
Setting aside these complex issues and their broader social contexts, one cannot help but wonder how the artist will choose to address the experience and trauma of childbirth. Of course, painting cannot encompass every aspect of that social reality, nor is it obliged to faithfully reproduce any single experience in its entirety. Moreover, creating a space within the tradition of Korean painting for the expression of sexuality and women’s lived realities is, without question, no easy undertaking. Nevertheless, Eunsil Lee’s paintings will likely continue to engage with women’s experiences and bodily sensations through the intertwined lenses of “taboo” and (public) “desire.” One can only hope that the sensitivity, technical sophistication, and narrative force of these works will continue to generate fascination and surprise in the face of yet another paradox.
