Blue Collar Objet
Minkyu Lee
작가 소개
Where perception, space, and material meet and shift.
Minkyu Lee is an artist and designer whose practice operates at the threshold between two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional furniture. His works transform functional objects into sculptural experiences, challenging the viewer’s perception of depth, form, and material.
By employing intersecting structural lines, optical illusions, and shifting perspectives, Lee creates objects that oscillate between image and furniture. Depending on the viewer’s position, a work may appear flat like a monochrome painting, only to suddenly reveal its full spatial presence. This interplay of presence and absence, reflection and absorption, forms a conceptual foundation throughout his practice.
Lee’s experimental approach extends to material and technique—such as applying the tonal gradation of East Asian ink painting to furniture, or constructing pillars and voids that reshape the surrounding space. His pieces invite the viewer into an active sensory relationship, asking them to move, observe, and rediscover the physical and visual boundaries of the object.
In series like Hidden, functional design becomes a study of concealment and exposure. Clothes are partially revealed depending on the angle, and the hidden stool completes the circular geometry, demonstrating Lee’s meticulous attention to spatial harmony and ambiguity.
Through these investigations, Minkyu Lee expands the definition of furniture, positioning it as a sculptural medium capable of altering perception, creating voids, and prompting new forms of spatial immersion. His works are not merely objects, but dynamic encounters between viewer, material, and space.
Main activity genre
Wood & Lacquerware
Category
Craft
ARTWORKS
This work combines the functionality of furniture with the flatness of monochrome painting.
The intersecting structural lines create an optical illusion, allowing the viewer to shift between perceiving it as a two-dimensional painting and experiencing it as a three-dimensional piece of furniture.
Its visual depth continuously changes depending on the viewing angle, which is one of the work’s defining characteristics.
Production Year: 2025
Production Technique: Wood carving
This work creates a space where presence and absence, reflection and absorption, and immediate perception intersect, encouraging the viewer to actively engage with and experience these shifting relationships.
Production Year: 2025
Production Technique: Wood carving
An attempt to create a new sensory relationship between the viewer and the material.
Production Year: 2025
Production Technique: Wood carving
This piece is an experimental work that applies the ink-wash gradation technique of East Asian painting—traditionally used to express depth and perspective—to furniture.
The front of the chair is finished in a deep, dark ink tone, which gradually becomes lighter toward the back. The thickness of the wooden components also decreases progressively, maximizing the sense of visual depth.
The work demonstrates how furniture can transcend pure functionality and expand into sculptural objects that embody spatial depth.
Production Year: 2025
Production Technique: Wood carving
The pillar occupies the space and creates a new void within it.
This void invites the viewer to enter and experience a new form of spatial immersion.
Production Year: 2025
Production Technique: Wood carving
The pillar occupies the space and creates a new void within it.
This void invites the viewer to enter and experience a new form of spatial immersion.
Production Year: 2025
Production Technique: Wood carving
The pillar occupies the space and creates a new void within it.
This void invites the viewer to enter and experience a new form of spatial immersion.
Production Year: 2025
Production Technique: Wood carving
A hanger is an object used for hanging clothes.
However, unlike a closet, it cannot fully conceal what it holds—leaving the clothes exposed and, at times, allowing unwanted colors to disrupt the atmosphere of a space.
The Hidden series hangers address this issue by covering the clothes without completely hiding them.
Depending on the viewer’s position and the movement of the panels, the degree of visibility changes—sometimes only the color of the garment is perceived, while from other angles, its silhouette also becomes visible.
Inside the circular form of the hanger, a stool follows the same radial geometry, creating a fan-shaped structure.
Finished in black to minimize its visual presence, the stool subtly disappears behind the hanger.
Production Year: 2025
Production Technique: Wood carving/ Ebonixing
