CHEEKY CHEEKY revisits Lee Sara’s imaginative world through the monsters and Lucky Bears that have previously played supporting roles in her paintings. While her Wonderland series centers on the figure of a girl who embodies contemporary dreams and aspirations, this exhibition turns its attention to the beings that have accompanied her. Moving from the margins to the foreground, these characters unfold their own narratives through gestures and expressions.

The title CHEEKY CHEEKY evokes a playful attitude and mischievous movement. Lee’s monsters transform apprehension toward the unfamiliar into a sense of affinity, roaming freely through colors reminiscent of cotton candy and ice cream. These soft, sweet hues offer a sensory point of entry, drawing viewers closer. Here, fantasy takes shape through the desire to keep a comforting presence nearby and the feelings we invest in it.

Beneath this visual lightness lies an accumulation of time and physical labor. Lee builds up layers of color, then delicately scrapes them away with a blade. Through this repeated process of adding and removing, underlying colors emerge, leaving traces of the artist’s hand and the time spent shaping the surface. Figures that hold dreams and aspirations are brought into being through sustained effort. The relationship between their sweet palette and the meticulous process of their making suggests the persistence and growth required to sustain an imagined world.

The paintings and thirty original sculptures presented as Lucky Bear with Friends extend this world beyond the picture plane. Taking on volume, these beings enter the same physical space as the viewer. In this transition, Lucky Bear and the monsters move beyond their supporting roles in the girl’s narrative to become independent points of encounter with the artist’s world.

Although the girl no longer occupies the foreground in CHEEKY CHEEKY, the hope she embodies continues through the beings around her. By bringing these once-secondary characters into focus, the exhibition offers another way of reading Lee’s practice. Their mischievous expressions, gentle colors, and the repeated gestures that shape their surfaces quietly reveal the time and relationships through which the worlds we dream of are made.