DirenLee’s 2022 solo exhibition Middle Earth unfolds in the space where reality and the unconscious intersect. For the artist, these two seemingly opposite worlds are not separate realms, but states connected through dreams. The exhibition explores this intermediate territory as a place where memories, emotions, and imagined experiences overlap, forming a world that is at once unfamiliar and deeply personal.

DirenLee divides the world of Middle Earth into the sun and the moon, constructing scenes that belong to different moments and psychological states. Within these shifting environments, time is expressed through subtle changes in light and shadow, while the vivid colors familiar from her earlier paintings are softened by hazy, dreamlike tones. The result is a visual atmosphere in which reality appears suspended, as though each scene has emerged from a memory that is still in the process of being recalled.

The figures inhabiting these works are projections of the artist herself and of people around her. Each carries an individual narrative, yet they coexist naturally within the same pictorial world. Rather than functioning as isolated characters, they become fragments of a larger internal landscape, connected by shared experiences and emotions.

“I was promised to remember the moment I saw the purple ball.”
— DirenLee

In DirenLee’s work, reality appears to have already been rehearsed within the unconscious. The unconscious self draws an invisible map of life, while the conscious self moves through reality by gradually recovering memories that had once been forgotten. The future, however, remains inaccessible. Its ending cannot be seen or remembered in advance; one can only accept the present moment and continue forward, one step at a time.

When confusion emerges, the conscious and unconscious selves encounter one another and attempt to reach a point of understanding. This process contains both pain and joy, distance and recognition. The two selves do not immediately become one, but continually approach each other through moments of confrontation and reconciliation. Middle Earth exists precisely within this interval—a psychological territory where multiple versions of the self can meet.

For years, DirenLee’s practice has explored communication, empathy, and inner healing. Her earlier works often reflected the gradual process of a reserved self opening toward the external world. In Middle Earth, however, this relationship shifts. The artist no longer observes her internal world from a distance, but enters it more directly and presents it with greater confidence.

Stories that once remained implicit within individual images now surface more clearly as narratives. Characters, symbols, and environments begin to connect across the works, allowing the exhibition to unfold as an extended story rather than a collection of isolated scenes.

Middle Earth therefore marks a transition in DirenLee’s practice: from suggesting an inner world to actively constructing it. Between the sun and the moon, consciousness and the unconscious, memory and reality, the artist creates a space in which different selves can coexist—and in which the act of moving forward becomes inseparable from the act of remembering.