Myoung Ho Lee
Myoung Ho Lee is a South Korean photographer best known for his 'Tree' series, in which he isolates individual trees in natural landscapes by suspending large white canvas backdrops behind them, creating striking images that blur the line between photography, painting, and installation art. His work invites contemplation of the relationship between nature and representation, asking viewers to consider how context shapes perception. Lee has exhibited internationally and his photographs are held in major collections worldwide.
Artists in conversation
Andreas Gursky
Gursky similarly uses large format photography to interrogate the relationship between reality and representation, often manipulating his images to question what viewers assume to be documentary truth. Both artists treat the photograph as a conceptual object rather than a purely indexical record.
Elger Esser
Esser creates large scale landscape photographs that hover between painting and photography, evoking a meditative stillness similar to Lee's isolated tree imagery. Both artists use the natural world as a vehicle for exploring representation and pictorial tradition.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Sugimoto uses photography to isolate natural and cultural subjects in ways that strip away context and invite philosophical contemplation, much as Lee uses a canvas backdrop to remove a tree from its surroundings. Both artists blur the boundary between photography and conceptual installation.
Artists who inspired them
René Magritte
Magritte's Surrealist investigations into the gap between an object and its representation directly inform Lee's practice of framing a real tree against a painted backdrop to question what we see versus what we think we see. The conceptual playfulness of works like The Treachery of Images resonates clearly in Lee's Tree series.
Caspar David Friedrich
Friedrich's Romantic tradition of placing solitary natural subjects at the center of contemplative landscape compositions is a clear pictorial ancestor to Lee's isolated tree photographs. Lee's work can be read as a photographic reexamination of the lone tree as a symbol of individual existence in nature.
Jeff Wall
Wall's practice of constructing elaborately staged photographic tableaux that reference the history of painting provided a critical model for Lee's merging of photographic documentation with art historical and painterly reference. Both artists treat the photograph as a deliberately constructed picture rather than a captured moment.