SUWON LEE 

La montaña sagrada

“One does not climb into a mountain; one enters it.”

Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

In La montaña sagrada (The Sacred Mountain), Suwon Lee brings together

three lines of work which, though distinct in form and materiality, converge

within a single constellation of meaning. The mountain appears as a

metaphor for origin, the body, and memory, and as a site from which to

reflect on the diasporic experience.

The main series, titled La montaña sagrada, focuses on mountains from

different geographies, among them Pico Bolívar, the Sierra Nevada de Santa

Marta, Mount Shasta, Mont Blanc, Mount Everest, and Mount Teide. Working

from images taken from vintage postcards that the artist collects, enlarges,

prints, and intervenes with oil pigments, these works activate the landscape

as a territory with a spiritual dimension. The interventions do not seek to

idealize the sites, but rather to awaken their symbolic power; they project

experiences of displacement, loss, and the search for belonging.

Within this series, the Canaima diptych occupies a central position. In this

work, the tepuis, sky, and earth are articulated together with water, present

both as river and waterfall, forming an image in which these elements

converge. More than a representation of a specific landscape, Canaima

functions as a symbolic synthesis in which geological, atmospheric, and

fluvial forces intertwine in a tense, dynamic balance. The work condenses an

understanding of territory as an energetic field and a space of origin, a place

where material and spiritual dimensions overlap. In this sense, Canaima

emerges as an affective and conceptual core of the project, an image of high

symbolic intensity from which the rest of the series is structured.

Lee conceives the mountain as a place one enters, one that demands time,

presence, and attention, rather than as a space defined by the conquest of a

summit. In this way, artistic practice becomes contemplative, and looking

turns into a form of dwelling.

This notion extends into the series Dictée/Exilée, composed of collages and a

video derived from the performance of the same name presented at

Americas Society in 2024. In these works, language unfolds like a linguistic

mountain, stratified by layers of memory, migration, and silence. Drawing on

texts from the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lee overlays images of

prisons in which political prisoners in Venezuela are held onto landscapes,

configuring a topography of political trauma and diasporic memory that

alludes to notions such as border, absence, and blurring.

Alongside these works is Tejiendo el origen (Weaving the Origin), composed

of two vintage photographs of the artist’s grandparents that are interwoven

and suspended in space, functioning as a genealogical foundation. Here, the

gesture of joining the images operates as an act of repair, in which genealogy

and affection intertwine as an emotional root and a point of return.

Taken together, the works construct a sensitive cartography in which

genealogy, language, and memory intersect with the experience of territory.

The mountain is not a fixed symbol, but a method and a practice of attention,

a way of seeing, remembering, and remaining.