Birth as a Wave: Lee Eun-sil’s 'PAGO' Visualizes Becoming
Creatrip Team
2 months ago
Artist Lee Eun-sil’s solo exhibition “PAGO” at Arario Gallery Seoul (Dec 17, 2025–Jan 31, 2026) transforms the embodied experience of childbirth into vast natural imagery. Drawing on traditional East Asian painting techniques, Lee converts sensations of pain, rupture, and overflow into waves, lava, mist and storms rather than literal bodies. Her large-scale works — including the 7.2m four-panel “Epidural Moment” — blur personal and cosmic registers: up close the canvases read as intense bodily energy; from afar they unfold as natural phenomena. The show resists sentimental or reductive readings of motherhood, instead asking what conditions and processes make maternal love possible. By visualizing the threshold where one world breaks and another begins, Lee frames birth as a shared, relational event that remaps private pain into a wider rhythm of life.
