JEEWI LEE | Field of Fragments | Sexauer Gallery | 22.11.2024-18.01.2025

until 18.01 | #4518ARTatBerlin | Sexauer Gallery presents from 22. November 2024 the exhibition Field of Fragments by the artist Jeewi Lee.

Field of Fragments

For years, Jeewi Lee has been working artistically with traces, embodied memories and phenomena of time, often linked to natural processes.

Some time ago, Lee turned her attention to sand as a soil material. In her exhibition Field of Fragments, she radicalizes this approach and presents a total installation that introduces visitors macroscopically and microscopically to this mineral-organic material that seems so familiar to us all, but is in fact full of wonders. Lee will show sculptures and pictures made of sand, but this time she will focus on individual grains and their astonishingly different shapes.

Sand is often considered insignificant, but it is one of the world’s most important resources. Sand is used to make concrete, cement and glass, thus without sand there would be no roads or cities. Sand is used to produce electronic parts, without sand there would be no solar panels or microchips and no artificial intelligence. We use sand to make toothpaste, jeans and entire islands. Beyond use by humans, sand is also an important reservoir for drinking water and a habitat for numerous animal and plant species.

In everyday language, we may think that there is an object as plentiful as sand on the sea. In reality, however, sand has become a scarce resource. Worldwide, 50,000,000,000,000 kilograms are mined every year, in words: fifty billion tons. That is the equivalent of forty billion cars. This mining leads to environmental damage that can destroy entire landscapes and ecosystems. But, even such a delicate balance the gender distribution of turtles can be thrown off by sand mining, because the temperature of the turtle nests is affected and, thus the gender of the turtles.

Sand consists of tiny pieces of deposited rock. It is pushed to the surface by tectonic shifts and individual particles become detached. These particles, known as grains, are washed to the sea by rivers. Each grain is polished and shaped like tiny sculptures. Washed up on the beach, mixed with lime from shells and corals, it has traveled thousands of kilometers. Some grains go through several cycles of deposition and migration and can be billions of years old before we leave our imprint in the sand on the beach for a few minutes.

Each individual grain of sand thus carries within it unimaginably long spans of time, distances and memories that tell of geological eras as well as everyday consumption, capitalism and migration. Sand is like liquid earth, constantly in motion, always in flux, consisting of minerals and remnants of its environment, each one an embodiment of memories.

The fascination with sand is so old that it has become inscribed in our language: a house is built on sand. Time slips through our fingers like sand. And as time slips away, people also disappear – like “a face in the sand on the seashore”, according to Foucault’s famous quote. It almost seems as if we could rediscover something of our lost time in Jeewi Lee’s Field of Fragments.

Jeewi Lee has been exhibited internationally. She has had solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen and the Kunstverein in Hamburg. Her works have been shown at the Bundeskunsthalle, Gropius Bau Berlin, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Hamburger Bahnhof, Mönchehaus Museum, and Urbane Künste Ruhr and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. Lee was a fellow of the Villa Romana and the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation. She received the Villa Romana Prize, the “junger westen” art prize and in 2025 she will be a fellow at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles.

Jeewi Lee developed the sculptures of Field of Fragments in collaboration with the geometry researcher Phillip C. Reiner.

Installation View, Marcus Schneider, Courtesy SEXAUER Gallery.

Always in motion and yet connected to specific places, sand holds geological memories in its elemental structure and at the same time evokes referential memories through its color, the feel between the fingers and the texture of its grain. The sand of today was once mountains, coral reefs and rock formations. Each grain has a geological lineage that connects sand to a place and its history, and at the same time each grain carries a symbolic association that indexes that history.
– What the Sands Remember, Vanessa Agard-Jones[1]

Dust, salt, ash, gravel, coffee grounds, sap, elephant dung. Sand. Jeewi Lee’s works are dedicated to remnants whose forms and aggregate states conceal embodied memories, which Lee tracks down and reveals. With her practice, remnants become legible as archives of past processes and potential futures. To decipher these subtle inscriptions, we must attune our senses and habits of attention to their unique physical properties and temporalities. Slow rates of erosion, the faster pace of biological decomposition, and the near-instantaneous effects of combustion place different demands on our cognitive abilities. In turn, these inscriptions provide incommensurable structures of narrative time – stories that parallel the dramas of human history but are often dismissed as background conditions, also known as “environment”.

As the daughter of two South Korean artists who grew up between Germany and Korea, Lee is attracted to matter that wanders and is sometimes “out of place”. The stories embedded in this matter reflect human experiences – not only as a metaphor, but also as an index: footprints in the sand (BLINDER BEIFALL, 2016); dust swept up from exhibitions, remnants left by visitors (GRAUWERT, 2017 to present); the gradual disappearance of the boundary between black and white gravel zones (FRAKTUR, 2018). Linoleum and Hanji-jangpan paper floor coverings that bear traces of use come to the fore and are part of Lee’s ongoing investigation into the mutual inscription of individuals and their surroundings – as part of a gentle but persistent invitation to perceive a material unconscious that is right beneath our feet.

Field of Fragments is the first exhibition to show Lee’s exploration of sand – a material full of paradoxes. Sand is one of the most abundant materials on earth. But after just over a century of building with glass and concrete and digital technologies using silicon, sand has become a scarce resource. Sand mining is leading to armed conflict and environmental degradation around the world, as documented in the film Sand Wars (2013). Sand is solid, but often behaves like a liquid (when poured) or even a gas (floating in sandstorms). Sand is a plural word that occurs as an uncountable quantity in language and in the world itself. The sorites paradox has preoccupied philosophers since the 4th century BC with the question of how many grains need to be added or removed to go from a single grain of sand to a heap (soros). Today, this is becoming an economic issue as artificial islands and beaches eroded by rising seas are “nourished” with costly sand fill from offshore seabeds. At the same time, sand dunes are spreading over ever larger areas under the pressure of desertification.

A collection of paradoxical sculptures marks the conceptual coordinates of Lee’s exhibition. Each represents a single grain of sand made from the same material, magnified more than 850 times to reveal its irrefutable uniqueness and evoke memories hidden in its curves and crevices. Contrary to popular belief, grains of sand are not ground smooth by friction over time, erasing the traces of past ecosystems and geophysical processes. Rather, these features create specific sand deposits with characteristic grain shapes, mineral compositions and other properties that form the physical and then digital basis of global infrastructures.

Carried from coast to coast by oceanic currents, sand literally and figuratively represents the dialectic of the universal and the particular – ‘a world in a grain of sand’, in the words of William Blake. And while intuitive, an enlarged grain of sand is a contradiction in terms, as sand is defined primarily by its size. Anything can become sand; today beaches are littered with bits of plastic and other synthetic materials eroded into grains of around 0.06mm to 2.0mm. Here, Lee’s minimalist aesthetic, consistently based on an austere palette of natural greys, now expanded to include the reddish, yellow and brown tones of sand, allows the imagination to take flight. As hyper-realistic reconstructions of grains of sand, the sculptures offer a touch of humour – a relief in the face of mathematical sublimity, bordering on the horror of the sorites paradox and the infinite task of counting. Under the pressure of the material’s own logic, they become surreal.

Fragment Proximitiy Son Real 23 01 / 97,6 x 65,6, x 68,6 cm, 2024, Quarzsand, Kunstharz, mixed Media, Marcus Schneider, Courtesy SEXAUER Gallery. 

These sculptures are the result of Lee’s intensive collaboration with geometry researcher Phillip C. Reiner, whose studio protoCtrl – advanced geometries specialises in parametric investigations of artistic concepts. Reiner’s work focuses on the development of artistic ideas based on natural phenomena described by mathematical and physical principles. Together, they selected grains of sand from various locations where Lee works, taking into account formal and poetic aspects. In collaboration with specialists from Carl Zeiss Industrielle Messtechnik GmbH, the grains selected by Lee and Reiner (0.3-1 mm in size) were scanned using an X-ray microscope. The scans were processed into three-dimensional computer models, which in turn formed the basis for the sculptures.

Field of Fragments is the first exhibition to show Lee’s exploration of sand – a material full of paradoxes. Sand is one of the most abundant materials on earth. But after just over a century of building with glass and concrete and digital technologies using silicon, sand has become a scarce resource. Sand mining is leading to armed conflict and environmental degradation around the world, as documented in the film Sand Wars (2013). Sand is solid, but often behaves like a liquid (when it is poured) or even like a gas (floating in sandstorms). Sand is a plural word that occurs in language and in the world itself as an uncountable quantity. The sorites paradox has preoccupied philosophers since the 4th century BC with the question of how many grains need to be added or removed to go from a single grain of sand to a heap (soros). Today, this is becoming an economic issue as artificial islands and beaches eroded by rising seas are ‘nourished’ with costly sand replenishment from offshore seabeds. At the same time, sand dunes are spreading over ever larger areas under the pressure of desertification.

A collection of paradoxical sculptures marks the conceptual coordinates of Lee’s exhibition. Each represents a single grain of sand made from the same material, magnified more than 850 times to reveal its irrefutable uniqueness and evoke memories hidden in its curves and crevices. Contrary to popular belief, grains of sand are not ground smooth by friction over time, erasing the traces of past ecosystems and geophysical processes. Rather, these features create specific sand deposits with characteristic grain shapes, mineral compositions and other properties that form the physical and then digital basis of global infrastructures.

Carried from coast to coast by oceanic currents, sand literally and figuratively represents the dialectic of the universal and the particular – ‘a world in a grain of sand’, in the words of William Blake. And while intuitive, an enlarged grain of sand is a contradiction in terms, as sand is defined primarily by its size. Anything can become sand; today beaches are littered with bits of plastic and other synthetic materials eroded into grains of around 0.06mm to 2.0mm. Here, Lee’s minimalist aesthetic, consistently based on an austere palette of natural greys, now expanded to include the reddish, yellow and brown tones of sand, allows the imagination to take flight. As hyper-realistic reconstructions of grains of sand, the sculptures offer a touch of humour – a relief in the face of mathematical sublimity, bordering on the horror of the sorites paradox and the infinite task of counting. Under the pressure of the material’s own logic, they become surreal.

These sculptures are the result of Lee’s intensive collaboration with geometry researcher Phillip C. Reiner, whose studio protoCtrl – advanced geometries specialises in parametric investigations of artistic concepts. Reiner’s work focuses on the development of artistic ideas based on natural phenomena described by mathematical and physical principles. Together, they selected grains of sand from various locations where Lee works, taking into account formal and poetic aspects. In collaboration with specialists from Carl Zeiss Industrielle Messtechnik GmbH, the grains selected by Lee and Reiner (0.3-1 mm in size) were scanned using an X-ray microscope. The scans were processed into three-dimensional computer models, which in turn formed the basis for the sculptures.

This process refutes any simplistic notion of scientific imaging as a direct ‘reading of the book of nature’. The data had to be comprehensively interpreted and translated in order to be usable for the creation of a physical mould. Across different levels – from the physical substrate to numerical information to 2D digital visualisation – Lee and Reiner worked from the scans to create a new material form of expression that is subject to both technical limitations and aesthetic demands. You have to understand the geometry of an object in order to bring it back into a physical form on a different scale and in a medium with a different material. Such a process cannot be automated. In order to produce the sculptures from sand using 3D printing, the technical limits of the printers, their size and resolution (layer thickness), as well as the weight of the material and its binders had to be taken into account. The largest sculptures were printed in several parts – fragments of fragments – and assembled into their final form. Their seamless mass and natural colour gradients are the result of a combination of technical planning and manual work.

With each change of scale and medium, sand grains exhibit different parameters, each of which is interesting in its own right: Size, shape, colour, mineral content, hardness, microscopic residues of smaller particles and radio-isotopic signatures that reflect the grains’ places of origin. Most characteristic of sand is that it is constantly migrating, driven by waves, carried by wind and oceanic currents, stirred up and then sliding down the slopes of shifting dunes. Sand differs from dust and gravel in that very movement in relation to the air: dust often stays in the air, while grains of sand suspended in the air are heavy enough to eventually fall to the ground and pile up. Gravel, on the other hand, is too heavy to be caught by an air blast. Regardless of its material nature or exact size, sand is characterised above all by its movement in the world – a movement against which its fixation in concrete seems like a futile protest.

In a study on efforts to prevent desertification in China, anthropologist Jerry Zee describes how the dynamics of sand reshape political time: ‘Sand transmits time in recursion. To remember through sand is also to predict. As a material that moves, accumulates, momentarily persists or tends to dissolve, it unites past and future burials.”[2] As in an hourglass, stopping sand means stopping time. Its temporary fixation in architecture or sculpture represents a snapshot on its inevitable journey.

Lee began her Field of Fragments series during a residency in Portugal in 2022, where she first developed techniques to use sand as a medium for painting. The current exhibition includes paintings made from sand collected in various locations, including the west coast of South Korea; Dakar, Senegal; New York City and Connecticut, USA; Alentejo, Portugal; and Mallorca, Spain. Each work captures the colour palette of the coastal landscapes from which the sand originates. ‘Like pigments,‘ explains curator Lydia Korndörfer, “the artist creates colour fields or colour gradients with self-collected sediment grains, as an homage to the works of the Korean art movement Dansaekhwa (”monochrome painting’), which reached its peak in the 1970s as a subversive, artistic response to the political crisis after the Korean War.’ Both in their aesthetic form and in their material content, the paintings embody the political contradictions of sand: sensual multiplicity and at the same time an empty projection surface.The ‘fields’ are reminiscent of the ancient technology of the sandpit, which is still used today for military simulation games and strategy development as well as for educational purposes. It is no coincidence that desert regions in the Middle East are among the most militarised areas in the world today. In this geopolitical context, sandy landscapes act as training grounds for ongoing conflicts over oil and gas. ‘By militarising certain elements such as sand and marking sandy landscapes as a stage for warfare, we also occupy the imagination inspired by these landscapes.”[3] Ironically, desert sand is too round and smooth to be used in construction and too light to remain on wind and wave-swept beaches. By evoking memories and fantasies, Lee’s colour gradients also draw reflections on the restless meanings of sand.

It will not go unnoticed that these themes can also be found in Lee’s earlier works, such as her installation Inzision (2018) in the Sexauer Gallery, for which 14 tonnes of black and white gravel were used to divide the gallery floor along a straight line. The installation is a metaphor for the 38th parallel, the original border between North and South Korea – a scar of the unresolved, tragic history of Korea’s division. The work takes on new meaning against the backdrop of some of the artist Robert Smithson’s reflections written over 50 years ago. During a tour of the prosaic town of Passaic, New Jersey, Smithson nominated a series of real and imaginary ‘monuments’. These places and objects do not stand out from their context, but show continuous processes to which they are subjected over time.

The last monument was a sandpit or a model desert. Under the dead light of the Passaic afternoon, the desert became a map of infinite decay and oblivion. This monument of tiny particles flickered under a dully glowing sun, suggesting the sinister dissolution of entire continents, the drying up of oceans – there were no more green forests and high mountains; all that existed were millions of grains of sand, a vast deposit of bones and stones pulverised into dust. Each grain of sand was a dead metaphor that equalled timelessness, through the false mirror of eternity …

I would now like to prove the irreversibility of eternity by using a simple experiment to demonstrate entropy. Imagine in your mind’s eye a sandpit divided into two halves, with black sand on one side and white sand on the other. We take a child and run it clockwise in the sandbox hundreds of times until the sand mixes and begins to turn grey; then we run it anti-clockwise, but the result will not be a restoration of the original division, but a greater degree of greyness and an increase in entropy.
– Robert Smithson, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey[4]

In this thought experiment in the sandbox, the monochrome state could simultaneously stand for reunification and oblivion. And yet Lee’s incision shows that the material and geographical specificity of the ground on which the experiment is conducted makes the decisive difference, as it influences the pace of entropy. For the actual experiment takes place in political time.

– Dehlia Hannah

[1] Vanessa Agard-Jones (2012): „What the Sands Remember.” GLQ 18(2-3), S. 325-346, hier S. 326.

[2] Jerry Zee (2017): „Holding Patterns: Sand and Political Time at China’s Desert Shores.“ CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 32(2), S. 215-241, hier S. 216.

[3] Nadine Hattom (2023): „Great Sand: Grains of Occupation and Representation“, in War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East, hrsg. von Umut Yıldırım, Cultural Inquiry 27, S. 105-120. Berlin: ICI Berlin Press.

[4] Smithson, Robert (1967): „A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.“ Zuerst erschienen unter dem Titel: „The Monuments of Passaic.“ Artforum 6(4, Dezember).

Vernissage: Friday, 22. November 2024, 18 -10 pm

Exhibition dates: Friday, 22. November 2024 – 18.01.2025

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Image caption: Installation view, FIELD OF FRAGMENTS, Marcus Schneider, Courtesy SEXAUER Gallery.

Ausstellung Jeewi Lee – Sexauer Gallery | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin