Untitled APT: Sun Lee Solo Exhibition

“For our house is our corner of the world—it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.” In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard regards the house not merely as a structure but as the place where memory, imagination, and reverie first take root. A house is both the physical space in which the body dwells and a place that gradually becomes an inner landscape as the sensations and relationships of life accumulate within it.

 

Sun Lee has continued her practice by observing the spaces and relationships that surround her, along with the sensations and memories that accumulate within them. In her early work, she explored ways of translating invisible experience into the language of sculpture and installation, converting memories evoked through smell—and the "intangible sensations and narratives" derived from them—into material form. She later extended this interest to everyday spaces such as saunas, focusing on the relationships that elements constituting an environment—water, steam, tile, mirrors—form with the body, and on the "embodied experience" generated within them. Observing how the environment surrounding the body transforms sensation, the artist explores how space accumulates and, in turn, evokes memory and emotion. For the artist, space is not merely a physical location but an environment in which bodily sensation and memory accumulate and acquire meaning, and her work is a process of revealing the invisible experience that occurs within it through the form of objects and space.

 

In Untitled APT, the artist draws on the time and sensations accumulated in the apartment where she has long lived, giving spatial form to the way memory shifts and reconstitutes itself. The apartment has long been a representative form of housing in Korean society, and for many people it is also where memories of childhood and daily life have gathered. For the artist, too, it is the space where she has spent the longest stretch of her life—learning its rhythms, finding her bearings within it. The entrance, hallway, doors, and windows she passed through again and again became part of an everyday landscape too familiar to consciously notice. Sun Lee focuses on how such spaces come to be remembered and reconstructed after time has passed, and she brings that remembered apartment landscape into the exhibition space.

 

Earlier this year, the artist revisited the apartment where she spent her childhood. The old stairs and hallway, the entrance and windows, were still there, but they had quietly diverged from the way she remembered them. The once-familiar landscape no longer matched her memory exactly, and faded portions and newly visible scenes coexisted. Following that subtle gap, the artist looked closely into every corner of the apartment, photographically recording what she found along the way. Blue APT marks the starting point of this process. With past markers erased, what remains is the color of aged walls, the light of the hallway, and repeating structures and surfaces. The apartment, once confined to personal memory, opens into a landscape onto which anyone can overlay their own experience.

 

What began in photography continues in the exhibition as three-dimensional space. The entrance, doors, windows, mirrors, room, and bed are not meant to faithfully replicate an actual apartment—they are different modes of access to memory, and devices that make traces of time visible. The entrance and door form a boundary that both separates inside from outside and connects the two; their repeatedly repainted surfaces and worn frames hold within them the passage of time in a single place and the relationships within it. The window shows the interior while keeping the viewer at a distance, suggesting that time gone by can be looked upon but not entered again. The clouded mirror does not return reality clearly. In Crying Mirror, viewers overlay their own memories onto the incomplete reflected image, looking at the artist’s space while confronting their own past. In Untitled APT (room) and Blue APT (bed), room and bed move beyond private space, revealing the incomplete structure of memory through familiar objects that have lost their function. Standing before that unfamiliar structure, viewers find disparate sensations beginning to intermingle—inside and outside, rest and tension, room and bathroom.

 

The exhibition unfolds as space where the structure of memory is ceaselessly rewritten as different times and emotions overlap. Through the objects and surfaces of a familiar space, the artist reveals that memory does not preserve reality as it was, but that new scenes form instead in the space between what has vanished and what traces remain. Walking through the exhibition, viewers follow the artist’s memory while recalling the house they themselves once inhabited and the time that still lives within it. Bachelard’s “first universe” no longer belongs to one person’s apartment. It expands into the countless houses that still exist within each person’s memory.