Mijung Lee creates sculptures which reflect issues she has faced as a female in the art world. In 2013 Lee introduced a series of artworks which represents the forbidden desires of various women who were harassed by ‘becoming a good girl’. Pull & Push is a prominent series which represents the artist’s main interest and by producing wooden toys that imitate a shape of a dildo, a sex toy, often explicitly phallic in appearance, Lee resists the irrational and invisible oppression in society.

At her current exhibition The Gold Terrace at Art Delight, Seoul, Lee focuses on the unreal which is more realistic than real. With a total of 15 objects, she blurs and twists the boundaries between original and its representation and ultimately explores the relationship between real and unreal.

Nowadays we can often see that people post their DIY (Do It Yourself) home decoration photos on social media. DIY allows people to overcome physical limitations and people prefer to put marble pattern sheets on furniture instead of really using heavy and high-priced marble. The title The Gold Terrace symbolically signifies an unrealistic space where young people living in small studios in the city cannot afford and represents the artist’s constant interest in ‘the actuality of a fake replacing the real.’

With consideration that we live in a society where we cannot be free from compulsion to be efficient, she transforms a typical white cube space of Art Delight into a kind of showroom. All the works presented at the exhibition seems very much like useful household furniture such as kitchen table, hangers, and shelves and these pieces represent the artist’s long-standing commitment to connecting two-dimensional painting with three-dimensional mediums such as sculpture and installation.

“Just as Russian constructivists a century ago who sought alternate approaches to connect the spatial sense inherent in paintings and sculptures with actual spaces, through imitating surfaces of paintings, sculptures, furniture and objects, Mijung Lee contemplates alternative materials and forms that can be represented by themselves. Lee’s artworks have a sense of painting and sculpture, but they are not real paintings and sculptures, but useful objects. They look very much like furniture, but they cannot be used since they are artistic objects exhibited in the artist’s exhibition. They constantly repeat imitation and representation, and eventually become a specific independent medium to carry out their own part.” - Soyeon Ahn, Art Critic.