Kyungseo Lee (b.1995) is an artist based in London. She earned her MA at the Royal College of Art in Painting (2023) and BA at Hongik University in Painting and Visual Communication Design (2020). Lee was selected as an artist in residence at Cité Internationale des Arts (France, 2016), and PADA Artist Residency (Portugal, 2023) and Soho Revue (London, 2025). Her works have been shown internationally including solo exhibition at LKIF Gallery (Korea, 2021), and a number of group exhibitions including shows with: OHSH Projects, Soho Revue and Blue Shop Gallery. She recently had solo exhibitions with Makasiini Contemporary (Finland, 2024) and Belenius (Sweden, 2024) and a duo exhibition at Blue Shop Gallery (UK, 2024).



Lee’s practice centres on the conflicting emotions and values that shape the human experience. Through erotically charged figurative imagery, she explores ambivalence around body image, desire, and emotional contradictions—occupying the grey areas between celebration and objectification, right and wrong, attraction and discomfort. Rather than offering resolution, her work deliberately sustains tension, inviting the viewer to confront their own responses, assumptions, and complicities.

Growing up in a highly polarised society in Korea has strongly informed this approach. Experiencing rigid binaries—social, moral, and generational—has drawn her toward the spaces in between, where meaning remains unstable and personal. Her curiosity and admiration for the ways individuals carry their own universes of values and experiences have also led her to explore these in-between spaces through painting.

The figures in Lee’s paintings morph into abstraction from form to expression. The abstracted form of bodies in her work emerges through painterly processes where image and material remain in constant negotiation on the surface of the canvas. This condition produces perceptual instability, in which forms are never fully resolved but remain in a continuous state of becoming. Her engagement with fluidity and the indeterminate use of colour is rooted in a question of how painting can hold what is transient. She leaves parts of the canvas unresolved, allowing absence to function as suggestion, while embracing spontaneity by letting colours flow and merge freely.







Photo by Ocki, Blue Shop Galleries Director