Sungjae Lee: Her Real Secret

LEE & BAE is pleased to announce Her Real Secret, a solo exhibition by Sungjae Lee, on view November 19, 2026 through January 9, 2027 at LEE & BAE, New York. The exhibition brings together suspended thread structures and panel-based works made between 2018 and 2026, marking Sungjae’s return to themes first explored in his 2018 work Her Real Secret: Onement. Her Real Secret presents a retrospective on the ways in which Sungjae's artistic practice and philosophy have evolved over the past eight years. Sungjae builds his sculptures and drawings from nylon wire, thread, sinkers, paint, and gold leaf, fixing precisely measured transparent lines into place and filling their interiors as densely as possible with randomly-arranged thread. This process, repeated night after night, reduces to a small vocabulary of geometric forms: spheres, cylinders, and broad rectangular solids. Formally, Sungjae’s works explore the middle-ground between looping lines and knitted textiles. The sculptural works in Her Real Secret, including Low Mound Burned Water, Skirt Waves, and Broken Water, are part of a series in which Sungjae “draws” in three dimensions by fixing thread to fabric and painting color onto transparent nylon line. Conversely, his Absorption series, pieces from which are on view in the exhibition, is part of a larger project called “Knitting Drawing” characterized by short, delicate lines in gouache which Sungjae likens to stitches accumulating in a knitted garment. Across the various media of his works, certain imagery recurs: a rounded belly, a hunched back, a doorway-like opening. Sungjae has described the exhibition's starting point as the figure of the aunt who raised him, whose hymns and quiet presence he has set against the compositions and color of the American Color Field painters he encountered while studying in the United States. Similarly evoking the sublime with massive works and bold colors, Sungjae focuses the viewers’ awe towards the ordinary life of a singular woman. The exhibition then extends this attention to other women in the artist's life, including his wife and his mother, whose forms he stitches into suspended works. Through his work, Sungjae Lee attempts to give shape to their invisible labor.