I meditate on scripture daily. Not in order to paint — the way one eats, because a life needs it. The paintings come out of that life; they are not the reason for it. The text always comes first. For many years the texts have been about water. Water flowing out from within a person. Water coming from the temple, and everything it reaches living. A river at the end of things, which we arrive at and stay beside. I wrote my doctorate on this and I have not finished with it. The most recent painting is called The River. The meditation takes different forms. Some days I read the text aloud, some days I write it out by hand, some days I draw from it or answer it with color. It changes from painting to painting and I let it change. What stays the same is the meditating. Reading aloud runs backward for me. When I say a text out loud the words do not go out from me; they come in. The mouth becomes an opening inward. I am not addressing anyone — I am taking something in through the organ I would ordinarily use to send something out.

Then the building begins. Pigment and medium accumulate until whatever I wrote or drew is no longer legible. It has not been covered over. It has been taken in: it stops working as language and becomes part of the body of the painting. The layers are a search, not a concealment. What I want is difficult and may be contradictory: I want the painting to deepen and stay clear at the same time. Depth is what the accumulating is for — but accumulating is also what turns paint opaque and heavy. The two things I want come out of the same act and undo each other. Every pass is a wager that this once the depth might arrive without the murk. Most of the months a painting takes are spent losing that wager and beginning again. It has occurred to me that this is also what water asks of a painter: depth you can see through. The subject and the material difficulty turn out to be the same difficulty.

I call the series Our Songs because that is what the paintings are to me. I believe the Creator is good. The work is how I receive what my life has held and give it back as song — all of it, not only the parts I would have chosen. The singing is the acknowledging. And the "our" is not only mine. I mean it to include anyone who finds themselves singing along, and I leave the door open. Two things I have not settled. Since 2019 I have been turning over whether the work should move toward the condition of drawing, and since 2023 abstract passages have been appearing in the paintings. They sit now between figuration and abstraction, and I do not know which way they are going. The other is a question. Whether what a person takes in changes what they put out. Whether a text someone reads and speaks and copies by hand leaves a trace in what they go on to make. I cannot observe this in anyone else, so I use my own studio as the instrument. The reading is the input. The painting is the output. The work is the only record of the passage between them, and I am not yet able to say what it shows.

This is why the underlayers stay unreadable. If the text were legible the paintings would become illustrations of it, and the question would collapse into an answer. I want to keep open the possibility that something moves from reading into painting without passing through meaning at all. I hope they reach people as comfort. Not only people who are unwell — I think most people are carrying more than they say. I cannot arrange for comfort to happen, and I would not want to. But it is what I am hoping for while I work.


Oseong Lee
Seoul, 2026