Hu Junjun and John Hyen Lee: From Beginnings

LATITUDE Gallery is pleased to present From Beginnings, curated by Sean Zhang. The exhibition features recent paintings by Hu Junjun and John Hyen Lee, contemporary artists whose practices converge in their shared investigation of the personal and universal experience of time and memory. Drawing from linguistic and spiritual traditions, their works explore the delicate tension between the material and the immaterial, the present and the void, the figurative and the abstract.

Hu Junjun’s serene paintings intertwine visual motifs drawn from Buddhist iconography and symbolism. Rendered in soft, meditative tones, her compositions depict a progression of the self toward transcendence. Spiritual archetypes and sacred landscapes appear not as fixed truths, but as shifting thresholds to the ineffable, inviting viewers to contemplate rather than to search for resolution. Her work gestures toward a state of enlightenment, namely the Buddhist concept of Nirvana, where personal joys and sorrows dissolve and the essence of life unveils itself.

“My visit to the North and South Grotto Monasteries had a profound effect on me. I suddenly felt as if a dust cloud had settled, letting me see how insignificant the conceptions of an individual were within the cosmos. All attachments would prove to be ephemeral, and all elaborations would return to the essentials.” 

This will be the artist’s first focus presentation in the United States, following her mid-career survey Hu Junjun: The Journey to Compassion at the Museo delle Culture in Lugano, Switzerland in 2024. 

Rooted in a shared sensibility for stillness and reflection, John Hyen Lee’s paintings find profound resonance with Hu Junjun’s meditative canvases. Lee, who is Korean American, draws deeply from his bilingual experience and the history of Hangul, the phonetic alphabet that gave form to the Korean language. Composed of grids, notations, and inscriptions, Lee’s oil-on-wood abstractions mirror both the structure of writing and the quiet rhythm of thought. In these pared-down compositions, subtle gradients and minimalist gestures evoke the instability of form and meaning in a world saturated with images and information.

Lee’s process unfolds slowly, beginning with the hand-construction of supports and continuing through a near-ritualistic application of marks. Each painting feels palimpsestic, shaped by the ebbs and flows of mark-making and its erasure. His gestures are deliberate yet careful, often meticulously measured to the width of a brush, translating each stroke into a formal consideration of time. These layered marks accumulate within a grid-like format reminiscent of childhood handwriting practice books and lined journals. They form a visual script that continually reveals and conceals over time. His approach, a confluence of Asian and Western traditions, resists fixed interpretation, instead opening up fields of perception where memory, language, and abstraction merge. 

The works of Hu Junjun and John Hyen Lee embody similar meditations on transcendence, one that is quiet, deliberate, and without spectacle. Both artists approach time not as a linear progression, but as a continual cycle of renewal and return. For Hu, the recurring motif of Nirvana recasts enlightenment not as an end point but as a continuum. This spiritual transformation of the self transcends the boundaries of beginnings and ends. In Lee’s practice, time progresses through the disciplined act of inscription and erasure, where each mark contains both the trace of what came before and the potential of what is yet to emerge. Each gesture, whether a religious emblem or a rhythmic mark, becomes an articulation of persistence and continuity. Through their distinct yet resonant vocabularies, Hu and Lee engage the rhythms of cycles and beginnings, finding within repetition a stillness that gestures toward the transcendent.

Hu Junjun and John Hyen Lee: From Beginnings curated by Sean Zhang and presented by LATITUDE Gallery.