This exhibition highlights the trajectory of Lee Yu-Woon’s work, in which the artist visualizes the interplay between emptiness (虛) and substance (實) through the architectural forms of the city.

For the artist, buildings are not merely functional structures.
They are histories layered with time—sites where traces of human presence have accumulated.

In Lee Yu-Woon’s work, the city is not fixed as the representation of a specific place.
Linear structures, repetitive facades, the rhythm of similarly scaled buildings, and subtle variations in the width of streets are organized into a kind of urban grammar.
This grammar evokes fragments of shared perception within contemporary life.

The order of architecture, standing firmly in place, exists as substance (實).
Yet the gaps and spaces left between them call forth emptiness (虛).
Rather than opposing each other, these two sensations define one another—speaking simultaneously of what is seen and unseen, what is filled and what remains open.

Within the continual cycle of construction, repair, and sometimes destruction, the architecture we encounter today reveals both the face of our time and the conditions of contemporary life.

Shadow, in particular, functions as a crucial element that condenses the tension between emptiness and substance within the artist’s compositions.
Attached to physical form, shadows extend across the surfaces of the city, subtly destabilizing the clarity of structure while introducing an ambiguous sense of depth.

Through a restrained visual language of ink, line, tonal gradation, and empty space, the artist quietly translates the structures of the city.
At times recalling architectural plans or aerial perspectives, the compositions emphasize structural order.
Within this order, emotion is not directly declared but gradually permeates the image.

This exhibition invites viewers to shift their gaze on the urban landscape—from information to sensation, from representation to contemplation.
It quietly asks what kinds of time and what kinds of human experience have accumulated within the structures we pass by each day.

At Gallery Artrie Heyri, we invite you to encounter
Layers of Time by Lee Yu-Woon.

Through this exhibition, you may discover how each of our own cities has been quietly recorded within memory.