Field of Fragments, 2024 – Jeewi Lee x Phillip C. Reiner

"Field of Fragments" is Lee's first exhibition to be constructed around sand. It was shown at Sexauer Gallery, Berlin, from 23 November 2024 to 15 February 2025. The exhibition is a total installation: it shows the material at the scale of both the macroscopic and the microscopic. In the space stand three large sculptures on the floor. Each is a single grain of sand from Mallorca, magnified up to several thousand times its original size and printed in bound sand. On a wooden crate and a glass plate rest smaller fragments from other coasts, among them Taean-Bando in South Korea, New York, Connecticut, Alentejo and Dakar. The titles give each grain's place of origin. The sand paintings are made from grains that Lee gathered in the places where she has worked: the west coast of South Korea, Dakar, New York and Connecticut, the Alentejo and Mallorca. Each painting captures the colour palette of its coastal landscape. Lee began the series during her 2022 residency in Portugal, where she first developed techniques for the use of sand as a medium for painting. Curator Lydia Korndörfer describes the paintings as colour fields laid down 'as if they were pigments,' in homage to Dansaekhwa, the Korean monochrome painting movement of the 1970s. Every sculpture begins as a grain that measures 0.3 to 1 mm across. The grains are scanned on a Zeiss X-ray microscope (down to 400-nanometre resolution) and the DICOM sequences are reconstructed into 3D geometry. The surfaces, once enlarged, reveal the history of each grain: angular fragments point to recent fracture; rounded forms indicate long transport by water; pits speak of chemical weathering. Lee selects grains for these qualities of detritus. Printing at this scale pushes the process to its limits. The largest sculptures must be printed in sections and assembled by hand; the mass, seamless, and colour gradients, naturalistic, are the result of both meticulous planning and manual work. The technical concept, the research and the fabrication took over a year to complete. The lighting is part of the work. Developed with Thorsten Kosellek, it bathes the room in warm reddish light that grows warmer as one traverses the space, giving the installation a desert-like quality.