After debuting in the early 2000s, Leeje began her career by making realistic figurative paintings on canvas that depicted Seoul’s changing urban landscape. Comprising a polyptych of six large canvases, Exit 3 of Hyehwa station, 3pm (2004) presents a panoramic landscape that documents a specific location and perspective in the city of Seoul. Looking back at her early paintings 20 years hence, the artist asks her colleagues to write essays containing their memories of the city and their own lives. These pictures and texts are reorganized into moving images, and the memories that surround us—anxieties of living in a rapidly changing city, ruminations on life following the death of a pet dog, loss of community, daily frustration or new hope—are transposed into abstract and synesthetic sounds, approaching what the author calls “painting-doing.”
