Dr. Eun Jung Lee - ARTISTIC PATH

COLOR

Color is the earliest point from which HOGYE’s inquiry began.

Working in the field of branding, color was an important element in shaping brand imagery, while also remaining a subject of enduring sensory interest.

Over time, this interest developed into a question:

Why are we drawn to certain colors, and why do we choose them?

This question became the starting point for exploring color in relation to human perception, cognition, and inner states.

COLOR SCIENCE · COGNITION

Questions about color led to research into how humans perceive and choose it.

During her doctoral studies, HOGYE investigated the relationship between personality traits and color preference, beginning to approach color not simply as a visual attribute, but as sensory information through which aspects of human cognition and inner characteristics may become perceptible.

From there, the inquiry expanded beyond color preference toward another question:

How are color, human cognition, and neural responses connected?

Color gradually became more than something to be seen. It became a way of exploring states of the human being that are not directly visible.

TECHNOLOGY

The inquiry into color and human inner states did not remain within scientific research. It began to move toward technology.

HOGYE developed methods for examining personality and inner characteristics through color preference into technological structures, building related intellectual property along the way.

The inquiry later extended beyond color preference toward another question:

How might human intuition and states be sensed and analyzed?

What began with color has thus continued toward technological possibilities for observing and understanding aspects of the human being that are not directly visible.

PAINTING

Alongside her inquiry through science and technology, HOGYE had long felt a sensory impulse to work with color directly and give it form.

As she began painting, she started observing which colors she chose, how she moved, and what appeared on the surface through that process.

Through the act of choosing color and moving with it, followed by looking again at what had emerged, painting gradually became another way of directly experiencing and observing her own color intuition and inner states.

Through sustained painting practice and the presentation of her work, she has continued to explore expressions arising where color and bodily movement meet. Within this process, movements and traces that would develop into her current painting language began to take form.

CREATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Alongside her exploration of color and human inner states, HOGYE’s inquiry gradually deepened toward the relationship between human beings and creation.

How do human beings sense, think, and generate something new?

How does what is unseen acquire form and emerge into the external world?

Through these questions, Changmyeonghak and Creative Philosophy took shape, leading her to understand sensation, emotion, thought, and production not as separate phenomena, but as parts of a continuous generative structure.

This philosophical inquiry, in turn, transformed the way she approached painting. Painting began to extend beyond the expression and observation of color, becoming a field of generation in which unseen inner movement passes through sensation and the body to acquire form.

CREATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Alongside her exploration of color and human inner states, HOGYE’s inquiry gradually deepened toward the relationship between human beings and creation.

How do human beings sense, think, and generate something new?

How does what is unseen acquire form and emerge into the external world?

KOREAN PAINTING · ILWOLOBONGDO

As Creative Philosophy took shape, HOGYE began to look at traditional Korean painting through a different lens.

Rather than reproducing traditional forms, she began to reconsider, through her own philosophical questions, how relationships among nature, human beings, and other forms of existence had been understood and expressed within these enduring images.

In particular, while contemplating the sun and moon, yin and yang, and the relationships among the natural entities depicted in Ilwolobongdo, she began to encounter points of connection between these enduring images and the generative structures she had been exploring.

Ilwolobongdo thus became more than an image from the past to be interpreted. It became a field through which she could look back upon her own philosophy and deepen her inquiry further.

MOON · MOON JAR

While contemplating Ilwolobongdo, HOGYE’s attention gradually came to rest on the moon.

The moon does not produce its own light, but receives the light of the sun and reflects it outward. Wherever that light reaches, it appears differently according to the material nature of what it touches.

In this relationship, HOGYE began to consider the movement of what remains unseen within human beings. Invisible energy passes through the body and the senses, emerging differently through each person’s experience and state.

As this inquiry deepened into questions of body, spirit, and soul, the Moon Jar began to appear as more than a traditional subject. It became a bodily form through which the unseen can dwell and become perceptible.

HOGYE’s Moon Jar paintings began by pouring emotions arising within her into this form through color and movement. She would then step outside the image and look again, sensing and coming to understand what had emerged from within herself.

To express, to observe, to sense, and to understand.

As this experience continued, the Moon Jar became not a fixed mode of expression, but a pictorial space for continuing to explore the relationships between unseen inner movement and the body, between color and the external world.

GENERATIVE LOOP

For HOGYE, a work does not end as a completed result.

A sensory engagement with color became a question about how human beings perceive and choose color, and that question led to scientific research. From there, the inquiry into color and unseen human states developed along two parallel paths: technology and painting.

Through technology, HOGYE sought structures through which these states might be observed and analyzed. Through painting, she directly experienced and observed her own sensations and inner states through color and movement.

As her inquiry into human beings and creation deepened and Creative Philosophy took shape, the direction of these parallel explorations became clearer. Philosophy transformed the way she approached painting, while also deepening her inquiry into how unseen human states might be approached through technology.

Now, the questions emerging through the experience of painting the Moon Jar—questions of color, movement, intuition, and states—are beginning to turn again toward scientific research and, from there, technological application. Painting becomes a field of experience and observation from which new research may emerge, providing the ground for future technological structures and algorithms.

Each act of generation forms a loop of its own, yet what emerges remains as experience and becomes the starting point for the next question and the next act of generation. Each Generative Loop closes, but the next generation does not begin from the same point.

As previous experiences and acts of generation become the ground for what follows, the trajectory gradually deepens and expands.

That trajectory is the Deepening Spiral.

HOGYE’s practice continues along this spiral.

SELECTED CV

Lee, E. J. (2026).

HOGYE

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