How to Paint a Universe
Hyun-Jeoung Moon
1. Layering the World as Image
“The world is my representation.”
This famous proposition by Arthur Schopenhauer is a declaration that fractures the notion of the world as an objective reality that we ordinarily take for granted. According to Schopenhauer, the world always exists as a subjective representation, an experiential scene constructed by a perceiving subject. The shape that the world takes may differ according to the way the subject apprehends it. If one follows this proposition, the representation of a common world identically perceived by all becomes, in principle, impossible. Nevertheless, Lee Sejun states that they seek to transfer onto canvas an impossible question: how to represent a shared world viewed by both themselves and others.
Lee Sejun’s work incorporates a range of art-historical elements and formal categories associated with painting, including figuration and abstraction, the human figure and the landscape. Yet such classifications do not constitute the core of the work. What runs through every layer is a single concern: the transformation of ways of seeing the world into forms of painting.
The artist’s paintings operate on the premise that ways of seeing are themselves constitutive of the world. This premise becomes tangible through the multitude of images that appear throughout the work. Landscapes seen from mountaintops, photographs exchanged with friends, snowmen, black birds, and the flames of campfires intersect within a single pictorial field, giving form to a world woven together from multiple perspectives. Images, each carrying distinct temporalities and spatialities, come to rest upon the canvas and assemble into a single world. Yet almost immediately, that seemingly complete world is recombined with other images and reconfigured into a new scene. The processes of combining and transforming canvases not only alter the overall form of the painting but also modulate the meanings and contexts embedded within the images themselves.
For this reason, the essence of the work does not lie in the images themselves. What matters instead is the process of asking what kinds of vision an image—understood as a world woven from multiple layers of perception—might in turn generate, and what contexts the worlds derived from it may come to contain. The multiple viewpoints embedded within a single canvas are repeatedly dismantled, reconfigured, and layered according to the ways in which they are combined, producing a different world each time. Grounded in the intricate entanglement of perspectives, Lee Sejun’s paintings construct diverse scenes while revealing the many potential forms that emerge through the continual proliferation of painting itself. Rather than constituting an objectively completed entity, Lee’s work is closer to a mutable structure, one that is renewed each time he paints. This can be seen in works that connect paintings made at different moments in time, or in works that create an “eternally existing” painting through the partial exchange of elements between multiple canvases.
2. Painting a Universe
In a recent solo exhibition, Lee Sejun turned to the task of painting the universe. From world to universe. One is inclined to look for a significant shift in this linguistic transition. Yet paradoxically, the methodology through which the artist translates the universe into painting remains fundamentally the same as that through which the artist has long translated the world. What therefore becomes important is the fact that the artist now speaks of painting not the “world” but the “universe.” The “universe” invoked by the artist appears closer to the notion of the universe than to that of the cosmos. It may be understood as an attempt to think, on a more expansive scale, the accumulated worlds, or rather worldviews, that have appeared throughout the artist’s practice. Even if the universe and the world ultimately refer to the same thing, this linguistic shift provides an opportunity to reconsider, at a fundamental level, the structures through which we have understood the world until now.
This linguistic shift expands beyond the question of “what to paint” and becomes a reflection on “how something is named and constituted.” If the earlier works followed the conventional language of painting by depicting spaces that could be represented, painting a universe moves toward presenting invisible relations, accumulations of time, and the infinite possibilities of chance through combinatory forms. It is no longer a matter of painting what is visible, but of reconfiguring, through the language of painting, the very ways in which worlds come into being.
Rather than assigning a fixed form to painting, Lee Sejun experiments with using paintings as a kind of modular system through which new images can be generated. Within these works, images exist in states of excess and disorder. Between them lie countless temporal disjunctions, and the sensation of difference produced by these gaps is transformed into a sense of velocity, accelerating the movement of images themselves. The division and recombination of canvases further opens innumerable intervals between existing images. As works are assembled, chaos is once again given a provisional structure, and completed images emerge from instability into temporary forms of order. This method is less concerned with arriving at a single finished image than with amplifying the directional tendencies and inherent entropy of each image, testing the many possible trajectories they might take. In this way, the role of the image shifts from representing an object to exploring the dynamics of the worlds that can be constructed through images themselves.
This method of working also resembles the construction of a simulation. If making images is fundamentally concerned with representation, simulation is closer to testing the ways in which a world operates. Within the exhibition, multiple worlds already rendered into images are presented side by side. What matters, however, is that they serve to simulate countless possible configurations of the world. Chaos is once again given order, and that order is continually transformed through recombination. The infinite worldview embedded in the notion of the universe is translated into a set of relations that can be perceived and interpreted.
3. Painting as a System
In the process of completing a work, Lee Sejun constructs it as though its various potential states have already been simulated in advance. For the artist, a single canvas is both an image containing a particular scene and a material that can be combined, like a module, to generate another scene altogether. A part becomes a whole, and a whole in turn becomes part of something else. Painting, understood as a whole, becomes a site where such scenes are continually rearranged and reconfigured.
If one were to compare this mutable structure to an organic form, it could be described as a proliferating system, one governed by its own internal order. Lee Sejun once described the work as “a dynamic painting that expands and branches out like a living organism.” Once again, through the artist’s own language, the conventional politics of scenes is overturned. Within these paintings, individual scenes are not components subordinated to the realization of a fixed state. Rather, these scenes constitute an assemblage of entities that continually transform according to their position, context, and relations with what lies outside them.
For example, Space Arcade, which reconfigures works produced between 2019 and 2023, begins by exploring new relations among existing paintings. The moment images containing different times and spaces are placed side by side, the narratives once contained within the individual canvases are disrupted, giving rise to new relational possibilities. Extending nearly eighteen meters in length, the work’s linear composition does not remain a fixed straight line but instead proposes a variable pathway determined by the space in which it is installed. Following this path, viewers may read a continuous flow of time, or pause within a single fragmentary scene and experience the overlap of disparate temporalities and spatialities. Even when similar scenes recur, the timelines and narratives they generate differ each time. Images that have already reached a state of completion within a particular context continue to reproduce themselves through other images inserted between them, partially replicating what came before while simultaneously generating new situations.
Another work, Meta-fiction, appears at first glance to resemble a floor plan, yet it twists three-dimensionally as it occupies and unfolds through space. Operating like an organism capable of continual transformation through multifaceted combinations, the work allows each canvas to seek out new forms through its relationships with adjacent surfaces. By fragmenting and reconfiguring an existing state, these forms acquire their own order and, in doing so, gain a degree of autonomy. Extending from the wall onto the floor and spreading throughout the exhibition space, the structure alters the conditions of visual perception according to each installation context. In responding to its surroundings, it continually generates new meanings through its relationships with the world around it.
Painting as a system not only alters the conditions through which images are viewed, but also makes it seem as though painting itself is engaged in a continual process of self-reconfiguration and self-regulation. In this way, the images within Lee Sejun’s paintings become both independent entities and interconnected universes in their own right.
Ultimately, Lee Sejun’s paintings are not singular scenes but prototypes of possibility. For the artist, “painting a universe” is not simply a matter of depicting the world; it is an act of thought that reorganizes and restructures it. “Is it possible to fully translate the structure of this world into painting?” Lee Sejun describes this as “an artistic objective that is destined to fail precisely because it is impossible from the outset.” Yet this objective, one that inevitably culminates in failure, remains an attempt to translate the disorder and infinity inherent in the world into perceptible rhythms and structures. It is precisely at this point that Lee’s paintings reveal the possibility of what painting can achieve as a means of thinking through and organizing the world.
Hyun-Jeoung Moon (Curator)
Hyun-Jeoung Moon writes and curates exhibitions with a focus on contemporary technology and media. She studied art theory and has worked at Urban Art Lab in Seoul, Barakat Contemporary, and Art Center Nabi. Currently working as an independent curator, she has organized exhibitions including Mirae/Building (Mirae Building, 2024), K90-99 (L.U.P.O, 2023), and Hotel, Dystopia (SeMA Bunker, 2022).
