Sona Lee
Sona Lee is a Korean artist currently living and working in New York City. She primarily works in painting and drawing, reconstructing surreal spaces where fragments of memories, dreams, and reality intertwine to create multi-layered visual narratives. Lee received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Konkuk University in 2021 and her Master of Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design in 2025. In 2023 and 2024, she was awarded the Lin Wang Endowed Scholarship Fund. Lee was selected as a Fall 2025 artist-in-residence for the Long Meadow Art Residency. Selected exhibitions include solo and group presentations at SPACS (2026), Detour Gallery (2026), C24 Gallery (2025), The Blanc (2025), On the Fringe NYC (2024), and 25 East Gallery (2023) in New York City; Paris Koh Fine Arts (2024) in New Jersey; and Raum Art Center (2023), Gallery LVS (2022), and Gallery Imazoo (2021) in Seoul.
Artist Statement
Lee's work visualizes surreal spaces where dreams, imagination, and memory intersect. Constructed through philosophical reflection and personal narrative, her compositions evoke scenes of the unconscious. Drawing on fragments of memory gathered across places and moments, she assembles disparate images within a single pictorial space, blurring the boundaries between inner and outer realities.
She is drawn to liminal spaces where serenity and unease coexist, transitional realms in which emotions, time, and memory converge and briefly unfold. She seeks to capture moments that feel familiar and calm, yet carry an inexplicable tension, where stability and fracture exist simultaneously. Her compositions often juxtapose intimate domestic scenes with subtle distortions, creating atmospheres charged with both stillness and tension.
Influenced by Minimalism and the aesthetic of emptiness in traditional Korean painting, she carefully considers the placement of backgrounds and objects, using negative space to heighten the expressive power of absence. Through this interplay, she reflects on escapism, emotional voids, and the fragile structures that shape contemporary relationships.
www.sona-lee.com
