Learn more about Kiwha Lee:
“What if painting isn’t a window through which an autonomous spectator looks, but a permeable structure where seeing becomes an exchange between viewer, image, light, and space?”
My paintings ask how painting can construct space beyond Alberti’s conception of painting as an open (glass) window (finestra aperta). Rather than treating pattern as ornament to simply look at, I use it as an active, permeable screen to look through — one that simultaneously obstructs, filters, and enables vision, decentralizing pictorial space and unsettling fixed relationships between surface and depth, figure and ground, and interior and exterior.
Central to my practice is a framework I first developed in my 2022 Hunter College MFA thesis, Ambiguity of Vision: Reimagining the Hypervisible Void, and subsequently proposed publicly through my 2024 New York solo debut, Light Punch : the jali, a non-Western perforated architectural screen in which ornamental pattern regulates the passage of sight, air, and light. I continued this inquiry later that year in Reverse Universe, my first European solo exhibition at Monti8 in Rome, where the work’s challenge to the Albertian window took on particular resonance within the Italian context from which this Renaissance model of pictorial space emerged. I approach the jali as an alternative to that model: rather than disappearing in the service of illusion, the patterned boundary remains materially present, mediating what passes between viewer, image, and world.
Informed by Korean and Chinese landscape traditions of pictorial space, I build these conditions through repeated impressions, transfers, layering, and shifts in opacity, reinventing processes from ancient Asian textile resist-printmaking techniques, yet in oil on canvas. These methods produce an unfolding experience of space rather than organizing the painting around a singular optical viewpoint.
My recent 2026 paintings extend this established framework from architectural toward bodily permeability. The jali’s perforated structure opens onto the body’s own porous relation between interior and exterior. In Breathing Through (2026), permeability takes on a respiratory quality: pattern moves across and through layers, suggesting pictorial space not as fixed or sealed, but as something that breathes—open to passage and exchange.
