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

Field of Fragments was Jeewi Lee's first exhibition built around sand, opening with a vernissage at Berlin's Sexauer Gallery at the end of November 2024 and running to 18 January 2025. Lee began the series during a 2022 residency in Portugal, where she first worked sand as a painting medium. The show paired sand paintings with sculpture. For the paintings she used sand gathered where she works: the west coast of South Korea, Dakar in Senegal, New York City and Connecticut, Alentejo in Portugal, and Mallorca. Curator Lydia Korndörfer described these as colour fields laid down "as if they were pigments," in homage to the Korean Dansaekhwa movement. The sculptures came from single grains. Working with specialists at Carl Zeiss Industrielle Messtechnik, Lee and Reiner scanned selected 0.3-to-1-millimetre grains on an X-ray microscope, then had them printed in bound sand at Sandhelden near Munich. Three sandstone-coloured pieces were shown, one about 1.5 metres long; a grain smaller than a millimetre becomes a sculpture near 200 kilograms, enlarged up to 850 times. The essay accompanying the exhibition was written by Dehlia Hannah.