Na Young Lee is an artist based in London whose work explores moments in which forms oscillate between emergence and disappearance. She approaches visibility not as a fixed condition but as an event unfolding at the intersection of presence and absence. Lee is currently completing her MA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, and has exhibited in both the UK and South Korea.

Lee’s paintings develop through shifting relationships in which form and background, the visible and the invisible, refuse to occupy fixed roles. Much like the conservation of energy—where interaction produces equal and opposing forces—any articulation of form on her surface generates its counterpart, and their positions reverse depending on the viewer’s focus. Her colors often appear singular but are in fact composed of layered flows that resist being fixed within the limits of human perception. Through establishing, destabilizing, and reconfiguring forms, Lee investigates the point at which the visible and invisible coexist.

Her process is succinct yet decisive. She begins with incidental traces—marks that appear through material contingency—and reads the directional flows embedded within them. Each subsequent stage unfolds in response to these emergent conditions, allowing form to arise not as a predetermined image but as the outcome of interaction between material chance and artistic choice.

This approach draws on phenomenological and posthuman thought. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of an invisible structure supporting the visible parallels Lee’s attention to latent orders on the surface, while Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action resonates with her understanding of form as co-emergent through the responsiveness of material agency, environment, and perception. Her work foregrounds these subtle exchanges and positions painting as a site where the thresholds of perception may be extended.

Working with pigments and oils—materials rooted in human craft—Lee seeks phenomena that exceed the boundaries of the human sensory field. This inherent irony drives her attempt to narrow the gap between the visible and the invisible, the human and the nonhuman. Rather than offering images to be deciphered, her paintings invite viewers to inhabit the moment when visibility is still forming—when the unseen begins to tremble toward appearance.