Dongwook Lee’s works focus on the contradictions that are fundamentally inherent in human existence and life. Exquisitely hyper-realistic and surrealistically imagined renditions of his miniature human figures are staged in absurd situations in Lee’s works, in which the bleak everyday life transforms into poetic horror. In Lee’s work, a fragile warrior is wearing his own flesh as his armor, and the naked child stands with innocent face in front of blood-stained killing (which he might have committed). His oeuvre stands at an odd intersection of life and death, beauty and cruelty, civilization and wild, and reality and fantasy, unfolding a world of fantasy where people are severed from reality.
