Full description from the venue
Jason Haam is pleased to present Idyll by the Tide , Mike Lee’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, following Homecoming in 2023. The exhibition presents a new body of paintings that marks a natural progression in Lee’s practice over the past several years.
Lee’s earlier work was defined by a largely monochromatic palette, graphic elements, and highly controlled surfaces. Over time, his painting became increasingly autobiographical through his family history, cultural roots, and experience as an Asian American. Since 2023, Lee has increasingly incorporated AI into the construction of his images, while his compositions have grown more figurative, elaborate, and complex. More recently, color has entered his work, culminating in the looser, washed surfaces and expanded compositions presented in Idyll by the Tide .
The new paintings depict families, companions, and solitary figures gathered along the shoreline. Successive washes of oil create establish soft expanses of sea, sand, and sky, while the figures retain the sculptural clarity characteristic of Lee’s earlier work. Traces of AI-generated imagery, including occasional anatomical irregularities, remain within the paintings, creating an unusual tension between technological construction and the increasingly expressive handling of paint.
The exhibition draws in part from Georges Seurat’s leisure scenes of the 1880s, particularly Bathers at Asnières and A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte . Like Seurat, Lee presents leisure as a moment of structured calm. Yet beneath these seemingly idyllic scenes lies a sense of uncertainty. Demographic contraction threatens the continuity of family life, while artificial intelligence increasingly challenges the place of human labor. Lee’s figures remain unconcerned with these larger forces, absorbed instead in the immediate pleasures of being together.
Idyll by the Tide brings these developments together without representing a departure from Lee’s previous work. Rather, the exhibition makes visible a gradual transformation that has moved from monochromatic precision and autobiography toward color, landscape, greater pictorial complexity, and a broader consideration of family, society, and the future.
Mike Lee currently lives and works in Seoul, Korea. He received his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, in 2006. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Seoul, and Nanjing, including exhibitions at Jason Haam, Half Gallery, and Sifang Art Museum. Lee has also participated in group exhibitions at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, the Honolulu Museum of Art in Honolulu, and the Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles, among others.