John Seung-Hwan Lee

Living my own art and making art out of my life

I was born in the US in 1987 shortly before my parents moved back to South Korea. I left South Korea when I was 15 and lived in New York prior to moving to Berlin in 2018.

New York was a world of opposites. I was going to grad school at Parsons The New School for Design and was at the same time engaged in the hip hop dance community. Occupy Wall Street in 2011 had charged me politically. Later I joined an activist hip hop crew called The Bronx Boys. All the while trying to elevate street dance to a form of high culture, I kept interest in approaches to use of language, to making art, and to question identities. My graduation left me with more questions than answers, and I came to learn that this never-ending quest is what drives my life and my practice.

After graduation, I listened to podcasts varying from art, literature, politics, history to philosophy, many in Korean. I had little contact with the Korean community in the US and was going through a conflict of inner identity. Reflecting on my historical circumstances, I became interested in North Korea’s unresolved history.

My sense of being foreign to New York’s tumultuous culture grew stronger. Berlin seemed like an artist-friendly city with a history that is deeply affected by the Cold War, similar to Korea. In 2018, I moved to Berlin where I attended seminars and reading groups on topics from North and South Korean relations to revolutionary theories. I was actively engaged in Korean activist communities, but eventually found that philosophy served me the best in fulfilling active and constructive exchange. Alongside, I came to more firmly believe that aesthetics and poetics can exert innate politics.

Organizing a philosophy reading group has become an integral part of my practice. Not only does it illuminate aesthetics, language, politics and history, but it is also a space of possibility for a community. This relation around the written words and readers informs my artistic vision to ground my own migratory experiences.

I have been shaped by significant relocations from South Korea to the US and from NYC to Berlin. This bodily and linguistic experience together with my training in dance informs how my body inscribes meaning. I become an agent of mark-making that blurs the boundary between dance, drawing, and writing. This approach emerges from an intuition that all forms of communication share a primordial origin.

I extend my studio practice into collective thought through reading groups touching on philosophy. The marks we make with our bodies and the questions we pursue in dialogue are inseparable.

I work across charcoal, wax, ink, and ballpoint pen on paper and canvas, alongside video, writing, and performance. Through these mediums, I reach for land mass and body mass.

Site specificity and historical context ground my embodied research. I make paper from the grass that grows at a site so the material carries the place. I draw with my feet, tracing the distance between where I can walk and the people I will never reach.

My purpose is to imagine and enact a different world, and a meaningful life within it.