current exhibition

Divewave

Junkyu Lee

Sculptures and installations

Opening Fr. 23.05.2025 7pm

23.05.2025-23.08.2025

The sculpture makes me realise that I am here. In April 2018, I left Korea and arrived in Berlin, Germany - a distant, unknown country. I learnt new languages, saw foreign landscapes and moved to Düsseldorf in 2019 to start my studies at the academy.
The rooms of the academy, imbued with the traces of many artists, allowed me to breathe in the past. But as I walked through unfamiliar streets, among unfamiliar faces, my presence began to blur. Who was I in this place?
In the midst of this uncertainty, I moulded a lump of clay in the workshop. The imprints of my hand, pressed into the material, preserved the moment: I was there. While my consciousness dissolved, the clay anchored me in the here and now. I called this daily confirmation of my existence sculptural addiction.
Corona came in February 2020. Isolated in my small room in Grupellostrasse, separated from the workshop, my existence faded again. Memories of sound, of touch, emerged. I transformed my 28-square-metre room into an improvised workshop - my own ‘space of spirit and time’.
Again I put clay in front of me, let movement and memory flow through my hands and confirmed: I was there.
The sound, steeped in the past, became the proof of my existence. Even when external circumstances - the pandemic, visa problems - isolated me, the sound stayed with me.
The physical fact that atoms never touch each other completely - that there is always a distance, an invisible tension between them - comforted me. Even if we could never really touch each other, even if every touch remained only an approximation, we still existed together in this world. Whether in Korea or Germany, I was alone, but connected by the things that surrounded me.
I touched them with my hands and eyes, wanted to feel their existence before we parted one day. Together with the things and the damp clay, I breathed in this room.
The mimesis of the hands in the clay solidified, dried, became a fossil of time - a silent testimony to our shared eye contact.
In July 2024, these sculptures were moved to the exhibition space. There, without me and without the original things, only the fossils of time remained. The viewer encountered the naked imprint of time, the echo of private memories, the waves that once ran through my room.
Now, in the year 2025, I look at the clay again. It is a lump of time, a body full of past breaths. Something in it seems to carry pain. Did I hurt it when I moulded it? A feeling of guilt interferes. The clay, once a tool of my affirmation, now begins its own time, its own existence. It contracts, deforms at will and interacts as its own subject with the world ruled by gravity. It proclaims: I am here too. I look at him. He is there, things are there - and therefore I am there too. The waves ripple in the cave. I jump back into them. We wave to each other. My body in the wave resembles the wave.

– Junkyu Lee

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