Seung-Jun Lee: Drawing as Accumulated Pressure

Seung-Jun Lee builds tension through large-scale drawing, repetition and restraint, where personal fragments harden into spatial systems.

4 min read
Seung-jun Lee artist in focus. a new series by Catapult Munchies art club - Image exhibiton view Carrier Pigeon at Subtitled NYC
Seung-Jun Lee: Drawing as Accumulated Pressure. Artist in focus by Catapult – The New Munchies Art Club. Image: Carrier Pigeon (installation), graphite and colored pencil, Subtitled NYC. Image courtesy of the artist.

Seung-Jun Lee – Drawing & Installation

Seung-Jun Lee (b. 1998, Korea) is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. His practice centers on large-scale drawing, often expanded into installation, where time, movement and everyday experience are compressed into dense visual fields. Rather than isolating single images, Lee accumulates marks, textures and gestures until they operate as a unified surface with internal pressure.

The work is driven by duration and repetition. Graphite and colored pencil are layered through sustained labor, producing images that feel less composed than worn in. Frames, supports and add-ons, from mixed-media constructions to taped or wooden elements, are not decorative but structural.

They reinforce the sense that each drawing is a physical object shaped by use, friction and persistence. Motifs reappear without narrative resolution: skeletal forms, architectural fragments, circulatory paths and looping perspectives that suggest systems rather than scenes.

Lee’s installations extend this logic into space. Projects such as Carrier Pigeon at Subtitled NYC and works shown at Living Skin and Tempest Gallery situate drawings as environments to move through, not images to consume at once.

Exhibitions in New York, Baltimore and Korea have positioned his practice within a context where drawing functions as a method of recording time and pressure, rather than representation.

What holds these works together is not symbolism but accumulation.

Lee’s drawings insist on staying unresolved, allowing density, scale and restraint to carry their weight.

This is Seung-Jun Lee on Instagram


Seung-Jun Lee Art:

Artist in Focus: Seung-Jun Lee Flip Coin While Worth - graphite and colored pencil on mixed media frame - Tempest Gallery - 5.2 x 7.5 ft.jpg(1)
Seung-Jun Lee: Flip Coin While Worth - graphite and colored pencil on mixed media frame - Tempest Gallery - 5.2 x 7.5 ft
Artist in Focus Seung-Jun Lee: That one friend - graphite, colored pencil, blue tape on paper - 12 x 9 inches
Seung-Jun Lee:Done Matter - graphite, colored pencil, woodstain on paper - Tempest Gallery - 12 x 9 inches
Seung-Jun Lee:
Artist in focus: Coney island forever - graphite, colored pencil, blue tape on paper - 12 x 9 inches -> Image Courtesy of the Artist

Catapult - The new Munchies Art Club

Artist in Focus is a new editorial series by Catapult – The New Munchies Art Club.
We spotlight new voices in contemporary art, from emerging practices to positions that demand attention.

Are you an artist, gallery, or curator?

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Artists on Our Radar:

Nadine Karl -> Can Space Remember What Time Leaves Behind?
Xiaozhou Liao -> The Weight of Play
Paes -> A practice shaped by movement and return


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