Lee works with hanji, Korean mulberry paper she makes herself, as a material-palimpsest, layering memories into a surface as much as an image. In Silence, parallel sinuous lines swell and recede across the sheet like tidal breath. The empty intervals between each line are not voids but presences: in Taoist thought, the interval is what makes connection between visible things. Something happens, Lee has said, against a background of nothing. Her ink lines, drawn to the rhythm of her own body, invoke a cyclical time the Greeks called aiôn, neither linear nor finite, but endlessly returning.

Roh Gippeum carries a sculptor's feel for weight and volume into her paintings. Her practice begins by stripping away the names and functions that society assigns to objects, asking what remains when we stop naming, what forms arise when we simply look. In 23-painting-32, familiar vessels and rounded masses float in a luminous ivory field, their edges dissolved into shadow and breath. Forms loosen, boundaries merge, and what emerges is something prior to language: a world encountered for the first time.

Over four decades, Jung Jong Mee has worked to revive and extend the material traditions of Korean painting. Song of Fisherman takes its title from a Joseon-era poem by Yoon Seon Do, an ode to a life of self-sufficiency and natural beauty, and renders it through equally traditional means: ramie cloth, natural pigments, dyes, and the kongdaem technique, a bean-emulsion ground that Jung herself has championed as a Korean counterpart to Western tempera. Her luminous, striated horizontals evoke both water and sky, landscape and longing, in a work that is at once deeply scholarly and purely felt.

Known as Korea's Flower Painter, Kim Chong Hak spent decades living within Seoraksan Mountain, not as an observer of its landscape but as its inhabitant, internalising its seasonal rhythms until nature and artist became inseparable. In his canvases, proximity and distance collapse into a single plane where near and far, foreground and background coexist without perspective, each element meeting the painter at the same intimate distance. The result is not description but embodiment, a wilderness internalised and poured back onto the surface of the painting, vivid and unreserved.

For over fifty years, Kim Kang Yong has built his singular pictorial world from the most obstinate of materials: sand, adhesive, and shadow. Applied in an even layer across the canvas, fine sand provides the actual texture of brick, while the illusion of depth and volume is achieved purely through a minimal play of light and shade. What appears as a wall of bricks is in truth a philosophical question about seeing, where the viewer perceives mass, structure, and weight all conjured from flatness. Reality + Image 2026 presents his most expansive and chromatically rich iteration yet, the palette having evolved from monochrome grey toward the vivid multi-colour he discovered in the brick facades of New York.

Whee approaches the canvas with a body-knowledge of material, weight, and resistance that runs through her background in sculpture. In recent years her practice has turned from observed nature toward something beneath form, a boundless unnamed energy that no conceptual framework can contain. Summer 2024, executed in layered charcoal, pastel, and oil, pulses with that urgency. Rough gestures and saturated colour press toward an invisible truth, and like tendrils with no fixed origin or end, the work is at once gentle and destructive, possessed of what she calls a tenacious vitality.

Shourouk Rhaiem collects and reconfigures everyday objects, adorning them with Swarovski crystals to explore the economy of desire, memory, and popular culture. From motor oil cans and detergent boxes to vintage toys, the objects she transforms become glittering monuments that ask how advertising imagery has shaped our everyday enchantment. Drawing on a colour sensibility honed in the Paris fashion houses and a long collaboration with Swarovski, Rhaiem makes the surface of consumer culture shine somewhere between celebration and critique.