I am on a journey to explore aesthetics and to resonate with the lonely inner world of modern people, marked by a more primal and incomplete self, through old artificial structures left alone on hostile ground.
Kyungtaek Lee (b. 1983) is a South Korean photographic artist based in Seoul. His practice explores the paradoxical relationship between modern civilisation and nature through images of abandoned artificial structures found in remote and inhospitable landscapes.
Over the past decade, Lee has travelled across the Himalayas, the Andean highlands, remote islands of East Asia, Russia and Northern Europe, documenting traces of human presence that endure by gradually assimilating with their surroundings. Through these landscapes, he reflects on permanence and transformation while evoking the solitary and incomplete inner world of contemporary humanity.
His recent bodies of work include No Man’s Land, Beyond the Visible and Zero Point.
Kyungtaek Lee (b. 1983) is a South Korean photographic artist based in Seoul whose practice explores the paradoxical relationship between modern civilisation and nature. Through photography, he examines the traces of human presence within the landscape and the ways in which artificial structures endure, disappear or become transformed by their surroundings.
Over the past decade, Lee has travelled across remote and often inhospitable territories, including the Himalayas, the Andean highlands, remote islands of East Asia, Russia and Northern Europe. His photographs focus on old and abandoned man-made structures that remain isolated within these environments. Rather than approaching them simply as remnants of civilisation, Lee observes how they gradually assimilate with the landscapes around them, suggesting that human traces may persist not through permanence, but through transformation.
Underlying this exploration is a more introspective dimension. Lee describes his practice as a journey in search of an aesthetic capable of resonating with the lonely inner world of modern people — a more primal, incomplete self reflected in artificial structures left alone on hostile ground. His landscapes therefore become both physical and psychological spaces, connecting questions of civilisation, nature and time with a sense of human solitude and vulnerability.
His recent bodies of work include No Man’s Land, Beyond the Visible and Zero Point. Alongside the photographic image itself, Lee places increasing importance on material and process. His practice incorporates large-format printing and specially treated papers and, in Beyond the Visible, traditional Korean hanji paper. Through processes that alter and partially erase the original photographic image, he extends his investigation beyond representation, exploring photography as both image and physical object.
Lee has steadily developed an international presence through solo exhibitions and major photography and art events. His work has been presented in Seoul, Paris, Arles, Stockholm and Kyoto, as well as at Photo Basel, MIA Photo Fair Milan, Paris Photo Days, Arles OFF Festival and KYOTOGRAPHIE KG+.
In 2024, he presented a solo exhibition during Arles OFF Festival in France and participated in Paris Photo Days with a solo presentation in the Marais district of Paris. In 2025, he participated in Photo Basel in Switzerland, where works entered a foundation collection, and returned to Arles OFF with another solo exhibition. His recent international programme has continued with presentations of No Man’s Land in Stockholm and Kyoto and Zero Point in Seoul.
Through this expanding body of work, Lee continues to investigate the fragile boundary between the artificial and the natural, presence and disappearance, permanence and transformation, while questioning what remains of human existence within landscapes that ultimately exceed it.
