The Sacred Mountains of Suwon Lee
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By Alejandra Villasmil
February 19, 2026
Originally published in Spanish in Artishock Revista
In her first exhibition at Sorondo Projects (Barcelona), Suwon Lee (Venezuela/Korea, 1977) presents a new body of work that marks a turning point in her exploration of the photographic image. While in earlier works the artist explored photography as a surface upon which light is inscribed and as a tool for reflecting on memory and identity, here she introduces a decisive shift: the direct intervention of oil pigment sticks. This material gesture displaces photography from its documentary function toward a denser and more sensory condition, where the surface becomes a field of energy and perceptual tension.
The photographic image, historically associated with referential fidelity and the recording of reality, operates here as a vulnerable support. Lee begins with old postcards of sacred mountains that she collects, enlarges, and re-photographs—images already mediated, produced to circulate as an institutionalized memory of landscape—and subjects them to an intervention that profoundly alters their visual economy. The paint does not erase the reference but destabilizes it; it exceeds it by introducing a material presence that opens fissures in the habitual reading of the image.
Mountains such as Pico Bolívar, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Mount Shasta, Mont Blanc, Everest, or Teide dissolve as recognizable icons under the application of pigment. By introducing an atmospheric dimension that disrupts their clarity, the image no longer presents itself as evidence of a place but as a space of experience. Photography becomes a palimpsest: it preserves its indexical trace while opening itself to a material reading that requires time and attention—in other words, contemplation.
Works from the Sacred Mountains series:
“Photography becomes a palimpsest: it preserves its indexical trace while opening itself to a material reading that requires time and attention—in other words, contemplation.”
— Alejandra Villasmil
This material transformation resonates beyond the formal. In Lee’s work, the mountain emerges as a symbol of origin, body, and memory, but also as a threshold for reflecting on diaspora and migrant identity. Born in Caracas to Korean parents and part of the recent Venezuelan diaspora living in Spain, Lee understands that the geographies that evoke a sense of rootedness—such as the emblematic Cerro El Ávila in her hometown—are simultaneously territories of longing and loss. The recurrence of landscape in this and earlier series by Lee does not respond to a romantic search for the sublime but to the need to think of territory as both a matrix of belonging and a space of uprootedness.
The diptych Canaima occupies an axial position within the series. The convergence of tepuis, sky, earth, and water constructs an image in which geological and atmospheric forces are articulated in a tense equilibrium. The work condenses an understanding of territory as an energetic field and a space of origin—a place where material and spiritual dimensions overlap without hierarchy. In this sense, Canaima emerges as the emotional and conceptual nucleus of the project, an image of high symbolic intensity from which the rest of the series unfolds.
The visual memory inscribed in The Sacred Mountain ultimately becomes a starting point for a contemplative experience that, within its apparent stillness, sustains a political position: insisting on the spiritual and affective dimension of landscape in a present marked by fragmentation and violence. In this sense, the mountain becomes a metaphor for a fractured identity in reconstruction, a symbol of growth and resistance in the face of global instability, and an occasion to think about the relationship between nature and subjectivity from a deeply intimate and critical perspective.
Strata of Language: Dictée/Exilée
In Dictée/Exilée (2024), the figure of the mountain becomes detached from the geographical and autobiographical to transform into a linguistic topography. The series—composed of six digital collages and a video recording of the performance of the same name presented in 2025 at Americas Society—shifts the relief of landscape toward the sedimentation of speech as critical and political material.
The collages are constructed through superposition: images of detention centers where political prisoners in Venezuela have been held—such as El Helicoide, La Tumba, Ramo Verde, Tocorón, Tocuyito, and Yare—are juxtaposed with fragments of Venezuelan landscapes that evoke vastness, borderlands, and distance, from the infinite mineral expanse of the Gran Sabana to the mist-covered mountains of Mérida or the irregular expansion of the barrios of Caracas. Together they articulate a field of forces where confinement and open space coexist in tension.
Within these visual planes appear words and linguistic fragments drawn from the texts of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, particularly Dictéeand Exilée/Temps Morts. These words appear blurred, fragmented, or typographically displaced, as if they too were passing through regimes of censorship, erasure, and enforced silence—transforming into signs of resistance and incantation against the violence of forgetting.
If in The Sacred Mountain the pictorial gesture densifies photography toward an almost opaque presence, in Dictée/Exilée it is language itself that acquires material thickness. The mountain becomes a metaphor for a memory sedimented through layers of political trauma, censorship, and exile—a relief constructed not upon physical elevation but upon fractures of speech and discontinuities of remembrance.
The video that gave rise to the series—recently incorporated into the permanent collection of the Busan Museum of Art—accompanies and expands this meaning through its performative dimension. In the original performance, projected as a visual and sonic montage of more than 380 images, Lee synchronized her voice while reciting words and names that refer both to intimate places and to traces of everyday life in Venezuela, creating a spoken portrait of her country of origin that simultaneously evokes its absence and fragility.
The piece culminates with the recitation of the names of the largest prisons in the country, powerful symbols of political repression and authoritarianism. Their recitation frames an ongoing struggle in which memory is redefined through distance and time, and where the act of speaking—even fragmented, even incomplete—becomes an affirmation of presence.
Genealogy and Recomposition: Weaving the Origin
In Weaving the Origin (2025), the inquiry into territory and rootedness turns inward toward the intimate sphere. Two old photographs of the artist’s paternal grandparents are enlarged, cut into strips, and manually interwoven until they form a single woven body, suspended in space and visible from both sides. The image no longer asserts itself as a stable document but as a vulnerable weave: a surface that reveals both the union and the wound that make it possible.
The act of weaving—slow, repetitive, bodily—introduces a methodological shift within Lee’s corpus. In continuity with the photographs intervened with paint, a manual temporality emerges here that demands persistence and care: the process itself becomes a strategy of recomposition. Yet the aim is not to restore a genealogy or mend a loss, but to accept fracture and make it structural—to transform the cut into a crossroads, separation into connection.
Taken together, the works in this exhibition create a sensitive fabric in which forms of language, experiences of belonging, and genealogical lineage intertwine. By challenging the supposed documentary transparency of photography and subjecting it to interventions, superpositions, and weaving, the image ceases to certify a place and instead becomes a space of reminiscence and critical inquiry. The mountain functions here less as an emblem than as a method: a practice of attention that involves dismantling, stratifying, and looking again—a way of inhabiting memories and fractures without denying them.
The Sacred Mountains of Suwon Lee will be presented from January 27 to March 27, 2026 at Sorondo Projects, Trafalgar 32, Barcelona, Spain.
Sorondo is a space that understands the exhibition as an act of hospitality: a place where identities in transit, cultural crossings, and material experimentation find a context of listening, care, and projection. Its founder, Juliana Sorondo (Venezuela), has transformed her own migratory experience into an ethic of work based on the sensitive accompaniment of Latin American artists and the construction of community.
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