L GALLERY presents *Shadow*, a solo exhibition by Diren Lee and the artist’s first presentation composed entirely of drawings.

A figure appears through a few lines, then seems ready to disappear again. In Lee’s drawings, bodies and faces do not settle into complete images. Pencil marks gather just enough to suggest a presence, while the unmarked paper around them leaves parts of that presence unresolved. What remains visible feels less like a portrait than something briefly brought to the surface.

Lee has long worked with figures caught between opposing states—consciousness and the unconscious, attachment and withdrawal, exposure and concealment. In *Shadow*, these tensions are stripped of much of the pictorial density of her paintings. The reduced vocabulary of drawing brings the figures closer to the gesture that produces them: a line traced, interrupted, repeated, or left unfinished.

The title refers to the presences that remain close without fully revealing themselves. These “shadows” are not separate characters but accumulated fragments of emotion, memory, and thought that the artist has carried over time. They emerge without forming a continuous narrative, closer instead to scattered notes from an unfinished monologue.

This incompleteness is central to the works. A shadow only becomes visible through its relation to something else, and Lee’s figures similarly exist through what is withheld around them. The blank areas of paper are therefore not empty backgrounds; they hold the distance between what can be shown and what remains difficult to name.

*Shadow* does not attempt to bring these fragments fully into the light. It allows them to stay partial—visible enough to be encountered, but never fixed long enough to be resolved.