Palgongsan Monotype Series

The Palgongsan Monotype Series consists of 12 unique impressions made with magazine ink, taking its title from Mount Palgong in North Gyeongsang Province, Korea—a Buddhist pilgrimage site east of Daegu and a recurring landscape in the Korean cultural imagination. Monotype is the least repeatable of print techniques: the artist paints or draws ink directly on a smooth plate and pulls a single impression, with at most a faint ghost print as residue. Lee's choice of magazine ink—a commercial pigment associated with mass-circulation print rather than fine-art editions—introduces a layer of material commentary on hierarchies between commercial and artistic printing. The series sits inside her broader practice as a temporary turn away from the sequential, animation-bound drypoint method, toward a slower, painterly engagement with a specifically Korean place. Palgongsan also marks a pause in the New York-set work that dominates her output from 2009 to 2014, returning her attention to a landscape from her country of origin.