Based in
New York, USA
Mediums
Themes
Education
Selected Exhibitions
Painting, drawing, printmaking (oil, gouache, sumi ink, etching, monoprint)
Migration, memory, resilience, urban isolation, connection and alienation
1984: M.A. in Printmaking, New York University
1978: M.F.A. in Painting, Hong-Ik University, Seoul
1976: B.A. in Painting, Hong-Ik University, Seoul
Collections/ Recognition
2025: Stories Within Traces, Riverside Gallery, Hackensack, NJ
2024: Calling Back, Calling Forward, From This Blanket (performance), Print Center New York, NY
2023: 30 Years, Art Projects International, New York, NY
2017: Soo Im Lee: Across Time and Place, Art Projects International, New York, NY
Works by Lee are held in numerous private collections in the United States and Korea. Her work has been featured in various Korean-language and American publications.
Rhizoscape: The Living Network exhibition in London will be showcasing some of this artist’s work from 19th February to 4th March 2027
Sooim Lee
Painter and printmaker mapping memory, migration and resilience through figuration and abstraction
Sooim Lee's practice is a living record of migration and endurance. Having left Seoul for New York in 1981, she and her painter husband survived an unheated Greenpoint, Brooklyn loft in the mid-1980s, an experience that permanently shaped her visual language. Her early figurative works carry the nostalgic landscapes of her Korean youth. Later pieces trace the raw physical struggle of displacement before settling into the abstraction that defines her mature practice. Lines and layers, built up over decades of painting, drawing and printmaking, become physical traces of survived winters and hard-won belonging.
In works such as People Mountain and People Bank, solitary figures move through shared space without connection, mapping the quiet alienation of modern urban life. In Way-1501 and Within Without C, the human figure dissolves into pure line and eventually into silence, tracing a descent from society to self. Lee's work turns personal diaspora into a universal testament to human endurance within the living network of memory and transformation.
Sooim Lee (b. Seoul, South Korea) is a painter and printmaker based in Brooklyn, New York, where she has lived and worked since moving to the city in 1981. She holds a B.A. and M.F.A. in Painting from Hong-Ik University, Seoul, and an M.A. in Printmaking from New York University.
Lee has exhibited extensively across New York institutions and galleries. These include her solo exhibition Across Time and Place at Art Projects International (2017) and the performance Calling Back, Calling Forward at Print Center New York (2024). Her work has also featured in institutional group exhibitions at the Queens Museum of Art, Arario Gallery and Rush Arts Gallery. She continues to live and work in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, alongside her husband and two sons.
Practice Themes
Migration and Memory
The experience of leaving one country for another, and the lasting pull of the landscapes and places left behind.
Urban Isolation and Connection
The tension of living among others in a city while remaining apart, and the wish for closeness alongside the need for personal space.
Resilience and Abstraction
Endurance through hardship and the slow building of belonging, expressed through the move from figuration to abstraction.
Her practice spans painting, drawing and printmaking, evolving from figurative memory to abstraction. Its core themes are migration, resilience, isolation and connection within modern urban life.
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2025: Sooim Lee: Stories Within Traces, Riverside Gallery, Hackensack, NJ
2024: Performance: Calling Back, Calling Forward, From This Blanket, Print Center New York, NY
2023: 30 Years, Art Projects International, New York, NY
2017: Soo Im Lee: Across Time and Place (solo), Art Projects International, New York, NY
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Private collections: Works by Lee are held in numerous private collections in the United States and Korea.
Publications: Her work has been featured in various Korean-language and American publications.
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2021: Paper and Process 3: Soo Im Lee, New Drawings. Exhibition essay and review, Art Projects International, New York.
2017: Soo Im Lee: Across Time and Place. Exhibition catalogue and critical text, Art Projects International, New York.
2016: Marking 2: Drawings by Contemporary Artists from Asia. Exhibition catalogue, Art Projects International, New York.
2013: Coloring Time. Exhibition essay, Korean Cultural Center New York.
Institutional note: Trained in painting at Hong-Ik University during the height of Korean minimalism and in printmaking at New York University, Lee bridges Eastern mark-making traditions with contemporary Western abstraction. Her multilayered compositions, characterised by intricate line structures and gestural rhythm, are regularly presented by Art Projects International and have featured in institutional group exhibitions. She is a vital voice in the dialogue between Asian visual heritage and modern diaspora abstraction.
Performance / public project: 2024, Calling Back, Calling Forward, From This Blanket, Print Center New York, NY.
Institutional group presentations: 2024, Visionary Catalysts: Wolhee Choe and the Empowerment of Korean Identity, AHL Foundation Gallery, New York, NY; 2016, Open (C)ALL: Up for Debate, BRIC House Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; 2010, FRAMING AIDS, Queens Museum of Art: Partnership Gallery, Queens, NY.
The Works
Sooim Lee
Sumi ink on arches paper,
2011
152 by 211 cm.; 60 by 83 in.
Price: POA
Scattered across a vast white expanse, these black ink silhouettes serve as fragmented portraits of modern individuals wandering without a clear destination. Though they share the same physical space, they remain entirely disconnected, each walking within the confines of their own solitude. The bleeding edges and varying tones of black, characteristic of traditional Eastern ink, beautifully capture the uncertainty of human existence and an inner emptiness.
Sooim Lee
Gouache on paper
2012
81 x 66cm; 32 x 26 in
Price: POA
We are all walking toward an unseen destination. The sight of countless people silently following one another reflects the journey we share in modern society. The color transition — from black to blue to green — transcends mere perspective; it symbolizes how human lives layer upon one another to form a massive ‘People Mountain.’
Sooim Lee
Oil on canvas
2015
51 x 51cm.; 20 x 20 in
Price: POA
Upon the primordial boundary of human skin color, countless lines of existence intertwine. Moving inward from the collective distance of the previous works, this fourth piece zeroes in on the most intimate and intense "dynamics of connection." The bodies, dissolving into shades of white and gray, lose their distinct boundaries; they embrace out of a desire for connection, yet simultaneously push each other away to guard their own space. It is a raw portrait of the psychological duality — love and loneliness, solidarity and alienation — that defines modern relationships.
Sooim Lee
Gouache on paper
2011
23 x 30.5 cm; 9 x 12 in;
Price: POA
‘Walk the line’ refers to adhering to rules or staying on the right path. The figures in my paintings move in a chaotic, restless manner as they search for their place. I wanted to paradoxically capture the quiet turmoil we each experience in daily life — the effort of trying to live up to the standards, or ‘lines,’ that society defines as the ‘correct answers.’
Sooim Lee
Oil on canvas
2017
56 by 51 cm.; 22 by 20 in.z
Price: POA
For what purpose did we walk those lines so fiercely? Some rushed frantically to find their place; some clustered together to build a monumental mountain; others drifted into isolation, or tangled painfully with one another. Yet in this final chapter, all that human uproar dissolves into a serene silence beneath a quiet, relentless snowfall. The white snow represents the grand order of nature, blanketing every trace of human struggle with absolute, egalitarian grace.