Sea Hyun Lee (Lee Sea Hyun) is having the first solo exhibition in London of his paintings, most of them informed or inspired by his experiences during compulsory military service in the Demilitarized Zone separating north from South Korea.

Lee’s paintings are a constant and seemingly obsessive shuffling of recurring fragments. He renders his landscapes in delicate but pervasive washes of red --- large swathes of unmarked white meandering between islands of crimson land. The stark, blank spaces are set against the detailed fragments in red but the overall effect somehow cohers into a flawless totality.

The series of paintings on show revisits and reconstitutes the landscape of the Demilitarized Zone, which cuts across the Korean Peninsula, acting as a buffer zone between the two Koreas. Reworking fragments of terrain, blocks of land and water, Lee creates a world driven, as it were, by the logic of its own making. It is a world that is entirely hermetic -- appropriately so, considering that the territory Lee depicts is defined by the apparent impregnability of its borders: He says:

"When I was serving my mandatory military service, I would be in a tactical area at night, close to the border. I would wear night vision goggles, which coated everything in red. The forests and trees felt so fantastic and beautiful. It was unrealistic scenery filled with horror and fear, and with no possibility of entering."

Lee’s painting functions both on political and aesthetic levels. The symbols employed in his work -- whether it is the filter of red or the way in which each of his imagined landscapes combines elements of both the northern and southern Korean mountain ranges into a seamless single landscape -- set the visual terms for his paintings, while also delivering a concise political message.

These are also deeply personal works that reference Lee’s own sense of the past and its losses. Here, Lee tarries with two familiar ideas: nostalgia and utopia. But he avoids approaching either with mere simplicity or mere skepticism. Instead, his paintings are infused with a sophisticated sense of nostalgia, and a wry idea of utopia.

Sea Hyun Lee was born on the Geoje Island, South Korea in 1967. He graduated from the Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts, London, in 2006, and currently lives and works in London. His recent solo and group exhibitions include shows at the Neuberger Museum of Art, New York; Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; Susak Expo, Island of Susak, Croatia; and the Museum of Hunabaci, Japan.

Sea Hyun Lee, 7 May 2008 to 5 July 2008 | Union Gallery, Ewer Street, London SE1