Hongmin Lee, grow wise, 2021, Acrylic on canvas, 91 x 72 cm, 35 7/8 x 28 3/8 in Over the Influence is pleased to present Meta Universe, a solo exhibition of paintings by Seoul-based artist Hongmin Lee. The exhibition will run from 10 February – 13 March 2021, with an opening day on February 10th from 11AM – 7PM. This will be Hongmin Lee’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. For Hongmin Lee’s first exhibition with Over the Influence, the Seoul-based painter presents a series of paintings that he has produced from 2019 - 2021. Consisting of his black and white paintings from 2019, as well as new paintings made in 2021, the exhibition will consist of various world views of the artist, from works produced in different years, highlighting the change in the artist’s views after 2020, which was marked by the Covid-19 pandemic worldwide. The deconstructed images of familiar yet incomplete characters, drawn in an animation-like style, produces a sense of anxiety and sympathy at the same time. Lee’s characters that exist in the two-dimensional flat world, lead us into a three-dimensional emotional world, jumping between reality and our imagination. In the artist’s past exhibition Neo Seoul the figures were represented in various forms of expression signifying the experimental stage of the characters development. These multiple characters were painted in stages of decomposition and reconstruction, eventually combining into a single form in his exhibition Homoculus, where an individual character became the focus of his work. In Meta Universe the artist now presents the combined multi-dimensional world of this figure to his audience. Hongmin Lee’s continuous expression and exploration of graphic, visceral metamorphoses of characters with bulging muscles, strident colors, and deep, intense emotions continue into his new paintings from 2021. His subjects transform into powerful grotesque beings that speak to themes such as despair, determination and the coming of age. As the artist himself explained once, “I believe the human body is an assembly of will, and I try to express it with twisted muscles”. Hongmin Lee studied animation at the Korea National University of Arts, and cites artists including Akira Toriyama and Katsuhiro Otomo as influences. After graduating, he setup the arts collective Goo For Brothers, along with Seungchul Oh and Jaejung Beck. With a shared love of kaiju and experimental imagery, the three have been working together since the early 2010s in illustration, fine art, graffiti, comics and animation. In parallel, Lee has continued to develop his individual fine arts career focused primarily on painting. He completed a residency in Bangkok, Thailand, in 2014 and has participated in various group shows in South Korea, including at the Seoul Museum of Art. His first solo presentation took place in 2015.