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). 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).


Within her practice, Kyungseo Lee explores the conflicting emotions and values towards the human experience. The erotically charged images serve as a stressor to the viewer, challenging one’s own ambivalence on the topic of ‘body image’. Grey areas in between the binaries of bodily celebration and objectification, right and wrong, good and evil have been a continuing topic and interest for the young painter. She has experienced certain social circumstances such as the polarisation in Korea, especially in her generation, which is one of the main factors that influences her paintings, as well as her genuine curiosity and admiration in how each one has their own universe of values and experiences.

The figures in Kyungseo Lee’s paintings morph into abstraction from form to expression; Lee has been specifically working on the fluidity in her paintings. In order to achieve this, she chooses to pull back and restrain the brush by leaving the canvas empty in places, bringing the ambiguity to the fullest extent by letting the colours flow and merge themselves. Worked with a loose painterly style, the figure soon dissolves into surface mark and gesture. 


Photo by Ocki, Blue Shop Galleries Director