Hyunmee Lee seoul, korea

Hyunmee Lee was born in Seoul, Korea, where she grew up practicing Western Modern art with experience in Eastern painting and calligraphy. She is recognized for her contemporary paintings executed using her unique process of “meditative gesture”. Strongly influenced by her connection to Asian calligraphy and her upbringing the Taoist, Buddhist and Confucianist traditions, Lee draws from a rich artistic and philosophical style. A playful combination of expressionistic abstraction and minimalist conceptualism, her work ultimately embraces and balances opposing energies. Her art practice spans three continents over two decades.

Lee received a BFA from Hong-Ik University. She then earned an MA and MFA from the University of Sydney. In 1989, Lee exhibited in her first commercial gallery at the Bonython-Meodemore Gallery in  Sydney, After returning from Australia to South Korea, Lee was a lecturer at Hong-Ik University and exhibited in major art galleries and art fairs in Seoul.

In the late nineties, Lee immigrated to the United States and settled in Utah, where she began teaching at the Utah Valley University, and eventually became a tenured professor. Lee had her first solo show in America at the Woodbury Art Museum in Orem, Utah. She has exhibited her large-scale work in the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and the University of Missouri-Kansas City Gallery. She was honored with the prestigious Fellowship for Visual Arts Excellence by the Utah Division of Arts and Museums.

Lee currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

"My art practice crosses three continents over two decades.  The works consider the images and ideas that mark my journey into the spiritual and cultural dimensions of painting as a creative activity.  During a period when I have carried adventurous journeys across several different social and geographic divides, I began to search deeper for an understanding of who I am, and where I am.  My paintings started to explore the idea of self as the most fundamental element of human nature; I tried to seek my identity as I examined human nature." — Hyunmee Lee