Weon Rhee

Weon Rhee is a South Korean artist whose sculptural practice explores how personal memory, emotion and perception are transformed into physical form. His work draws upon experiences and visual impressions accumulated during childhood and adolescence, not as subjects to be reproduced, but as fragments reconsidered through the perspective of the present.

Rhee grew up in Yesan, a small rural town in South Korea, where his family operated a mushroom farm. His childhood was shaped by the surrounding natural environment and by a family in which creativity and curiosity were encouraged. These early experiences, together with the visual culture that fascinated him as a child and teenager, continue to inform an evolving personal vocabulary of forms, colours and sensations.

Rhee studied woodworking and furniture design at Hongik University, completing his bachelor’s degree in 2021 and his master’s degree in furniture design in 2023. Although trained within the discipline of furniture, his practice has developed towards an increasingly sculptural language, centred on material exploration and the translation of memory and perception into three-dimensional form.

His present work draws upon an internal visual archive formed over many years. Memories of the Korean countryside exist alongside dinosaurs, animation, science fiction, imagined prehistoric worlds and other elements of popular culture encountered during his formative years. Rather than illustrating these references directly, Rhee allows them to change over time. The resulting sculptures emerge from a dialogue between those accumulated memories and the perspective of the artist he is becoming.

Central to Rhee’s practice is Parallel Strand Lumber (PSL), an engineered timber developed for structural construction. Initially drawn to its stability and layered texture, he recognised in the material possibilities that conventional approaches to wood carving could not offer. Through carving, reconstruction and dyeing, he transforms PSL into highly individual sculptural forms whose surfaces retain the material’s inherent structure while acquiring an almost geological presence.

This tension between seemingly opposing qualities recurs throughout the work: engineered and organic, familiar and unfamiliar, stillness and movement. Rhee is interested in allowing these qualities to coexist rather than resolving them into a single reading.

Rhee received a Special Mention at the SaloneSatellite Award in 2023 and was a finalist for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize in 2024, with his work exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. He has undertaken a residency at Marunuma Art Park in Saitama, Japan, and his work is held in collections including the SaloneSatellite Permanent Collection and Marunuma Art Park.