FRIEZE SEOUL 2026

CAPTION presents a compact archive of works by Yongjae Lee (b. 1991, South Korea). The works on view embody Lee’s ongoing inquiries into the layered temporalities of painting and the aesthetics of the ‘post-original,’ gathered in an installation that complicates the distinctions between painting, artifact, and document. These works incorporate fragments of records from the early modern Korean period preserved in the Smithsonian Archives, the latter which exhibits such images as factual yet ultimately resist resolution. Reconstructed photographs depicting laborers tattooed in irezumi and Emperor Gojong’s reception room are superimposed to engender a subtle tension. However, Lee moves beyond the referencing of tradition and records as he reinterprets the lacunae between them, working hyper-temporally to fabricate potential histories. Visually incomplete vestiges are viewed not as errors but fissures of alternate possibility; as such, the ambiguity in Lee’s work becomes both a place to inhabit and a generative source of new narratives in the overlapping of pictorial grammar and trace.