Cinema
2026
AlMg3, DIP-LED, Computing device, audio equipments
Size Variable
Music: <Portrait>, 2026 Composed and performed by Ilhoon Son.
A single pixel emits a changing field of light, flanked by two horn-shaped speakers. What remains is not picture but pulse, the moving image stripped of the resolution that contemporary visual culture trains us to expect.
The pixel holds material compressed past recognition: fragments of early cinema reduced until faces dissolve, set beside fragments drawn from the Bangudae petroglyphs near Ulsan, marks that have resisted stable interpretation for millennia. Separated by thousands of years, both sources arrive here as indistinguishable light. Neither survives as information. What remains is duration and interruption, an image asked not what it shows but what it requires of us before meaning is allowed to arrive.
Sound completes this reduction. Portrait is composed and performed by Il Hoon Son, his first work to enter a museum gallery after a practice built in the concert hall, drawn from a serial composition first performed by pianist Yeol Eum Son and rewritten here through his conversations with Lee on the void and the cave. Removed from the concert hall, the music no longer accompanies. It shares the room with light on equal terms until neither can be read without the other, and the visitor stands in their meeting point rather than before either alone.
This sits within Lee's wider concern, across Off-line Images, with how images now reach us before events can be understood, sorted and circulated until clarity is mistaken for truth. Shaped by his own passage between Seoul, Cape Town and Leipzig, Lee treats the image as a site where meaning is never given but always made, in this case requiring nothing less than the time it takes to remain with a flicker that will not resolve itself.