Artist Lee Hee-joon’s works catch the eye with intense color schemes when walking through the 1st floor lobby. Contrast between the intense blue and yellow colors appears to be subdued by a harmony of beige in the center with black and white. Viewing the work from close up reveals that it consists of photo images touched up by the brush strokes of the artist, who is creating a buzz with his unique creative expression of the cities and architecture around us. Seen from afar, it looks like an abstract painting. However, his works are created using the photo-collage technique. This consists of cutting and combining photos to produce new images that feature a newly created space and time within them, while showing real images through photography. The author re-interprets surrounding landscapes in his own way through the Image Architect series, which entails colorful paintings of photographs taken by the artist himself, onto which unrelated random architectural objects are superimposed. As the title The Place Where We Meet indicates, the piece views the lobby as a gathering space, in apparent anticipation of the various encounters that are to take place here.

Lee Hee-joon rose to prominence when all of his works sold out in just five minutes on the first day of the Art Busan 2022 art fair, quickly becoming the most sought-after young Korean artist in the local art scene. His work consists of abstract paintings of various sights taken from daily life that bring a new dimension of space to the two-dimensional canvas. His quintessential work, A Shape of Taste, is an abstract color painting influenced by changing city landscapes. In a further extension of his output, his recent work Image Architect was produced using the photo-collage technique. He is currently based in Seoul and has held solo exhibitions at Kigoja, Weekend, Yeemock Gallery, Incheon Art Platform, and Kukje Gallery Busan, in addition to participating in a number of group exhibitions both in Korea and overseas. In 2019, he was selected for the Grand Prize at Public Art New Hero and in 2021, he began an artist residency at Incheon Art Platform. His works are mainly found at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Art Bank and Seoul Museum of Art.