Kyungmin Kate Lee - Playground

Playground begins with a simple but unresolved question: how does meaning form when what we see is incomplete, softened, or in transition? Developed through digital infrared imaging and extended post-processing, the work dismantles and reconfigures the image through shifts in light, color, and surface. Familiar environments—winter forests, playgrounds, swings—gradually move between clarity and ambiguity, allowing perception to unfold incrementally rather than instantaneously. Across the series, color functions not as decoration but as structure. Saturated tones emerge through repeated processes of separation and recomposition, while surrounding spaces settle into muted gray tonal fields. The resulting tension between emergence and restraint shapes a perceptual space sustained through delay, instability, and ongoing transformation. The playground appears not simply as a subject, but as a recurring structure shaped by repetition, pause, and movement. Produced primarily as archival pigment prints on cotton rag paper, the works invite viewers into a slower encounter where meaning emerges gradually through time, attention, and embodied experience.

Recipient of the 2026 Gladstone House Award at Artist Project Toronto