<Ayana Hanbich Lee’s Themes and Concepts: Temporality, Perception, and the In-Between>
Ayana Hanbich Lee is a contemporary abstract painter whose practice investigates the non-linear structure of time through the material behaviors of paper, wood, paint, and chemical processes. Having lived and created work between South Korea and the United States, she experienced early on the dissonance and resonance of multiple cultural viewpoints, and this constant oscillation fundamentally shaped the perceptual foundations of her practice. Her work reached a wide international audience when a set of her paintings appeared in the Netflix-broadcast Korean drama Moon in the Day, where more than ten artworks were featured throughout the mise-en-scène of the show. This unexpected visibility affirmed her belief that painting can circulate through expanded channels, entering cultural consciousness in ways that extend beyond the traditional boundaries of art spaces.
At the core of Lee’s practice is Effacement, a methodology built on the understanding that time does not unfold in a straight line. Effacement is paradoxical to the traditional purpose of painting: instead of constructing a final surface through accumulation, it reincarnates stratified layers through removal. Lee’s process reveals twisted and intertwined temporal strata, exposing the hidden architecture of time itself. Sequential removal of layered paper and pigment, together with etching and chemical intervention, form what she often calls a “dimensional collision”, the structural juxtaposition of past and present within a single frame. In Effacement, to remove is to reveal; to eradicate is to reawaken.
I was born in Seoul and moved to the United States in 2008. My teenage years unfolded between the two countries, and this pattern of leaving and returning produced a constant perceptual reset. Everything familiar became unfamiliar; everything known had to be sensed again. This repetitive re-encounter shaped my earliest awareness of perception—the way the outer world enters the inner self, and how the inner realm responds, rearranges, or resists.
Fine arts were my first and most persistent desire. I grew up participating in school-wide, statewide, and later international competitions, eventually entering The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, my long-dreamed institution. But while awards and education grounded my skills, the true artistic journey began only when I claimed the identity of “artist” for myself, a declaration made not through external validation but through internal necessity. That moment is far more recent than one might expect.
My early work centered on interior sensations, emotion, memory, the fragile contour of presence. Over time, this expanded outward into the micro-environments of my daily life, and eventually into a study of “presence,” the encapsulation of lived moments. Ephemerality transformed from a subject into a medium.
Living between two cultures, two languages, and two perceptual infrastructures intensified my interest in the mechanics of perception: how we process information, how “logic” is culturally promised, and how communication hides its own structural rules beneath the surface. My art is not inspired by Culture A or Culture B, but by the transitions between them, the perceptual turbulence of A→B, the reassimilation of B→A, and the ambiguous spaces in between. These transitions functioned as a conceptual gear, generating the initial spark for my exploration of time and cognition.
Over the years, these concerns bifurcated into two branches—temporality and perception, and eventually converged into a singular methodological system. My Sequence Paintings (also called Making-Film) organize presence into chronological order, generating a visual dialogue. Effacement, conversely, operates as a reverse chronology: a method that removes to reveal, excavating the past rather than coating it.
To efface is not to erase; it is to excavate.
To remove is to reawaken.
To reveal is to let the past speak in the voice of the present.
Conventional painting often seeks full coverage, sealing, finishing, finalizing a surface. But covering, I learned, is a form of burial. It erases the history that gives the work its internal logic. My approach therefore shifted toward a leaner methodology, preserving early traces while constructing new sequences. Each decision becomes an ethical choice: How much of the past must remain in order for the present to be understood?
This methodology has attracted significant interest from professional artists, graduate-level art students, and material researchers. Many have visited my studio to learn aspects of the Effacement process. These sessions often develop into deep conversations about the ethics of erasure, layered temporality, and how non-linear time can be constructed materially. It has been profoundly meaningful to see this methodology extend beyond my personal practice and enter larger conversations within contemporary abstraction and material-based research.
I believe all things in nature operate through balance, transitioning from imbalance to harmony, negotiating ratios, and generating energy through those shifts. My creative process mirrors this universal conversation.
I cultivate quietness through sketching and prayer, creating what I describe as a calm, pond-like wavelength. But sometimes energy arrives unannounced—a sudden “whoosh.” When it hits, I surrender entirely and let it guide the work until it dries out. The bluntness of art is that the viewer often senses this same energy. I value routine, but I honor spontaneity. Together, they form an ecological system within which my paintings emerge.
After completing my BFA at Cooper Union, my practice shifted profoundly. The transition from New York back to Seoul catalyzed a more structural engagement with time, sequence, and erasure. Visual art is often consumed in a single instant, while cinema, theatre, and literature unfold sequentially. My practice disrupts this “one-second consumption” by introducing cinematic logic into painting.
In this way, the painting becomes “Making Film” quasi-cinematic, durational, unfolding, and equipped with its own internal temporality. Time is not just represented; it is built into the structure of the work. My interest increasingly expanded from an introspective whisper to a macro-structural inquiry into systems, cognition, and the underlying logic of the universe. I examine how origin and conclusion can collapse into one another, how beginnings are often revealed only at the end, like discovering the first alphabet of a sentence in the final moment of reading.
I was initially hesitant to exhibit publicly, preferring the privacy of experimentation. But this changed when my paintings appeared in the Korean drama Moon in the Day, now streaming on Netflix. The incorporation of my works into the show’s mise-en-scène reached unexpected audiences across international borders; the series ranked within the top-8 globally on multiple platforms. This experience revealed the capacity of media to circulate art through unconventional channels, allowing it to enter daily life rather than remain confined to gallery walls. Since then, I have welcomed interdisciplinary collaborations and embraced film, design, and hybrid cultural platforms as expanded territories where painting can migrate, transform, and breathe.
Art is everywhere, open eyes, closed eyes, a blink, a shadow, a fleeting arrangement of objects. Once someone learns to perceive art, it becomes impossible to unsee. Art contains voice, spirit, and time. It stores the consciousness of a moment and preserves the periods we risk forgetting.
A phenomenon happens as a result of time.
A form emerges from accumulated layers.
A painting becomes a chronological record of sequential decisions.
Movement becomes the accumulation of time.
Layers represent structural memory.
And by natural law, layers grow upward, outward, sideways, never only forward.
Within these principles, I practice “layers of times” in a painterly manner. I arrange elements that embody different periods, sometimes fabricating new sequences to create composite timelines. The time-gap, parallax, entanglement, between objects is captured in a single frame. Transparency, texture, and etching give viewers space to form their own theories, to navigate the temporal architecture of the work.
My paintings borrow from still-life traditions and realism to enhance the “accumulation of time” within one pictorial site. A layer is a snapshot of time. Layers pause, collide, and negotiate. Translucency conceals or reveals. Time dries at different speeds, creating hints about the duration between events. Each textured noise, each gesture, becomes a trace of a temporal block.
Through carving, etching, disguise, and revelation, I seek to show that the ambiguity of time, its simultaneity, its misalignment, its echoes, creates space for viewers to read, misread, and re-read the work. The painting becomes a record, a video, a structure of moments arranged and rearranged through both logic and intuition.
My practice is an ongoing study of how time behaves, how it stacks, slips, fractures, and returns. Effacement, Sequence Painting, and quasi-cinematic approaches are not merely stylistic strategies but philosophical engagements with perception and temporality. I paint to study the architecture of moments. I paint to understand how presence is constructed, how memory refuses linearity, and how the past and future continually awaken one another. I practice to expand the reach of this methodology so that it contributes meaningfully to contemporary art on an international scale.
Painting, for me, is not a static image. It is a record of time.