Lee Sung-mi takes the painful memories derived from personal microhistory as the starting point of her work, and has embodied them through the polishing and condensation of fragile materials. In her work, materials and processes themselves align with the content and occupy an important position.

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The artist projects her own image onto discarded or concealed entities, such as shattered car glass fragments and soot from incense, carefully collecting and reassembling these unsettling things. The countless glass shards are built into an oval-shaped organic mass (Melting It, Melting Me), and the drifting smoke is engraved as soot inside a translucent box (Landscape of Memory).

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In the sculptures of Lee Sung-mi, which gather in unpredictable layers, one can find an attitude of Zen. The laborious handwork of cleaning broken glass and gluing it back together, along with the persistent movement to capture the drifting ash-gray silhouette, draws the self toward a state of impermanence and egolessness, thereby creating a space of infinity. The form, made up of countless layers of time and space, allows the viewer to immerse in a world of meditation.

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Through the use of translucent materials, the artist conveys the depth of time accumulated from within, while also reflecting the strata of memory beyond the worn surface. Drawing of Mass series is a work in contrast to her previous materials and methodologies. While the two earlier works use translucent materials like glass, resin, and plexiglass, allowing the traces of the artist to be read beyond their surface, this series builds an irregular bas-relief mass, then repeatedly draws, adds, and erodes, unfolding non-linear gestures and time through the space between the removed surface.

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Lee Sung-mi recovers the scars of past memories through sculptures that allow one to gauge depth from the surface and the surface from the depth. The recovery of the scars, which materializes the temporality of the vanished, allows the viewer to tactilely experience invisible cracks, evoking a new sense of longing and healing.