The Brooklyn Rail

There is nothing more saccharine and sentimental than a painting of a conventionally attractive young woman in a garden. Jaeheon Lee has framed his current exhibition Ghosts in the Garden around this particular subject: there are four large-scale oils of ethereal, melancholic girls in an expressionistically rendered state of nature, and numerous studies of seemingly female faces. The Pre-Raphaelites come to mind, particularly Sir John Everett Millais, as well as the realist Jules Bastien-Lepage. But unlike the genre paintings that these dry and pedantic movements produced, the portraits of young women, Ophelia (1851–52) and Joan of Arc (1879), respectively, refuse to exit our collective consciousness; Lee has also captured that fuzzy borderline between our projected social/romantic requirements and individual turmoil that these figures clearly represent. The paintings Figure in a Garden, (2022–24), Figure in a Garden, (2013–24), and Figure in a Garden (2016–24) follow the Millais/Bastein-Lepage template: intricate, almost seething and trippy vegetation surrounds a lost-yet-found young woman. The nineteenth century European painters relied on the girl’s fictional or historical narratives to explain her emotional situation; Lee instead employs a stylistic gesture—his natural background is a Fauvist thickly painted field of singular brushstrokes—very Matisse, very Munch; and the faces are lugubrious smooth oases of Richter-like photo-real blurring. It’s a direct and obvious technical choice that yields a dazzling emotional punch. Is this the male gaze? To some extent, yes, but Lee pulls his subjects from K-pop performers, which, like Ophelia or St. Joan, are equivocal beings manufactured by a culture to embody both the pressures put on young women, and simultaneously unpack those pressures.

The intersection of this love, lust, and angst takes place in the figures’ faces. The prophet Ezekiel tells of “living creatures” with four faces, each visage signifying a different aspect of divine energy, simultaneously terrifying and sublime, and Lee’s portraits—especially his studies—are fantastic accumulations of eyes, noses, and mouths, twitching and writhing in multiple directions. While referencing Hindu and Buddhist representations of the many incarnations and aspects of sacred beings, through multiple faces and limbs, Lee avoids the didactic or diagrammatic styles of representation in religious imagery. In Study of the Face (2024), he paints the head of a black-haired woman in a dark red v-neck shirt. She stares out at us from two blank and dark recesses for eyes—the shadow under her chin, her other prominent feature. This ghost simultaneously turns her head to create a sharply defined profile—her chin and aquiline nose heightened in white. The effect is that of a “slo-mo” movement—much of the face in Lee’s studies is a no man’s land of inscrutable flesh—a body in motion with a phantomlike speed or slowness. In One in Three (2024), a girl in a white hat seems to execute a ghostly nodding motion—but though the faces blend into each other, they are distinct in skin tone, plausibly evoking multiple individuals or incarnations. K-pop bands also play with physical conformity with just a touch of difference—hair color, skin tone etc. Lee extrapolates a spiritual metaphor from pop culture while scrutinizing it as well.

What is it that youthful and innocent musical groups confer on a willing populace? BTS, BLACKPINK, Spice Girls, Menudo, even the Beatles or the Jackson 5 (though I would argue that the quality of music pulls them out of the category) all subsume the difference of the discreet parts of the ensemble to a greater whole. Lee’s accumulated entities are far too elegiac to fit into the cultural parameters assigned to these actual banal vehicles of pop culture: he has transformed them into probing avenging angels of our own grotesque depravity. My Ghost (2024) is a nine-faced, multiple-bodied monster in pale yellows, blinding off white, and grays. A line of rich egg-yolk yellow outlining the figures adds a luminous depth to the monster making it sinister despite its calm sweetly inquisitive half-smiles and carefully coiffed hair. An irregular line of dots forms the creature’s eyes, more akin to a crustacean or an insect than a higher mammal. In its presence we both appreciate our universal cultural tendencies to burden youth with a higher morality because of its perceived innocence and sweet intentions, but this glowing ghost with its eighteen-eyed stare, forces us to question our need to consume this innocence in such elaborate sexualized forms. Lee is content to admit his need to absolve a lifetime of accrued blemishes on the shoulders of a beautiful scapegoat. Are you?