“BLURRED” — A Vanishing Object by Lee JungHyun to Appear at the Royal Academy of Arts' Summer Exhibition 2025 

BLURRED exists at the intersection of sculpture, ritual, and time. As a scented, functional object that gradually fades, it collapses boundaries between use, atmosphere, and form. What remains is not material, but memory.

“We often think of art as something to preserve,” says Lee. “But what if its meaning comes not from lasting, but from fulfilling a role—then letting go?”

Lee calls this the “1 to 0” philosophy—an object created to fulfill its role, then vanish. As time elapses, colour and scent ebb away; use merely hastens what time already guarantees.

This positions BLURRED within a lineage of process-based and time-sensitive art, echoing artists like Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Lee Ufan, and Edith Dekyndt—each exploring disappearance, restraint, and subtle transformation—while also aligning with Eastern philosophies of impermanence and non-attachment.

A Material and Philosophical Dialogue

Responding to Royal Academy of Arts' 2025 Summer Exhibition theme Dialogues, BLURRED engages in layered conversation:

• Material dialogue — Soap—a biodegradable, intimate, and overlooked substance—becomes a radical sculptural choice, questioning the hierarchies of medium in contemporary art.
  
  

• Philosophical dialogue — Drawing from Korean Dansaekhwa aesthetics, where repetition, restraint, and subtle erasure carry weight. In BLURRED, presence is defined by its disappearance.
  
  

• Temporal dialogue — Unfolding not in the moment of viewing, but through time itself—blurring the distinction between creation, consumption, and conclusion.
  
  
  

“Could something as fragile—and as dismissed—as soap hold space in one of the art world’s most enduring institutions?” asks Lee. “I wanted to test the limits of meaning and materiality—to explore whether disappearance could be monumental.”