C.A.V.E
2026
giclée print on Hahnemühle Baryta
150 × 150 cm
C.A.V.E. presents a dense image field against a chroma-key green ground. Fragmented pale bodies appear alongside enlarged eyes and a radiating sun. A spiral form and a chequered ground complete the composition.
The work draws on the Bangudae petroglyphs near Ulsan. These Bronze Age carvings remain visible today though their original purpose has never been conclusively established. The same source appears in compressed form in Lee's video work Cinema. Here the petroglyphs are not presented as archaeological record. They are treated as marks that persist without becoming fully legible.
The green ground is significant to the work's method. In film and digital production chroma-key green is designed to disappear during compositing. In this work it remains visible. The surface therefore keeps in view a technical process that is usually hidden from the finished image: a background isolated and prepared for replacement.
This concern with what an image includes and what it withholds runs through the wider body of work under the title Off-line IMAGE. Cinema compresses two visual sources including the Bangudae marks into a single pulse of light. Ostinato Interstice Rendering keeps open a gap between four languages that no single sentence closes. Opus 1 (Die Fuge der Kunst) points to the convention by which one image is read as universal within art history while another is read as regional. 48 Framed Images resists a single fixed identity for the body it depicts. C.A.V.E returns to the surface underlying all four works: the green field built for disappearance held here in a state of continued visibility.