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Born near the Korean demilitarized zone (DMZ) in Cheorwon, Haevan Lee (b. 1990) divides her time between Korea and the Netherlands. Through painting, installation, and video, she examines militarized borderlands as sites where geopolitical fractures permeate landscape, memory, and the body. For Lee, the border is not a static demarcation but a fluid perceptual and psychological condition—a “buffer zone” suspended between contact, separation, and isolation. Combining research into contested sites around the world with her experience of growing up near the DMZ, her pastel-hued imagery of unspoiled nature—part stylized iconography, part pastoral reverie—harbors a latent sense of unease. The fluid melding of organic forms and corporeal traces on her pictorial plane is typically interrupted by spare geometric marks evoking military signage, of warnings and limits, the minimalist shapes collapsing the distance between aesthetic form and geopolitical reality. Lee’s practice reactivates the conventions and vocabulary of the landscape genre to interrogate the idea of borders as a spatial and embodied condition, a living threshold where tension and vulnerability alternate with generative potential.
