La Montaña Sagrada.
Paris Photo | Booth presentation with Suwon Lee.

Suwon Lee’s La Montaña Sagrada (The Sacred Mountain) marks a pivotal moment for both the artist and Sorondo Projects, celebrating their first joint participation at Paris Photo. With this presentation, Lee expands her visual language and revisits the conceptual axes that articulate her practice, in dialogue with the gallery’s curatorial vision.

In this new series, the Korean-Venezuelan artist explores the relationship between identity and territory, understanding landscape not as an external space but as an extension of memory and inner experience. The mountain, with its silent and imposing presence, acts as both refuge and mirror, a place where the fractures of identity find an emotional and temporal anchor.

Working from vintage postcards of sacred mountains, Lee undertakes a process of recovery and healing. Her intervention with layers of oil pigments in soft and metallic tones transforms the photographic surface into a hybrid territory, where the image is reborn as a palimpsest in which the record of the past and the perception of the present coexist. Each pictorial layer suspends time between the visible and the veiled, revealing a form of attention that is at once sensory, meditative, and spiritual.

The series proposes a state of inner and spiritual peace that contrasts with the impossibility of attaining it in the contemporary world. In a context of global uncertainty, Lee offers the work as a refuge for contemplation, where nature, persistent and majestic, emerges as the guardian of a still-possible harmony.

The Sacred Mountain extends the continuity of Suwon Lee’s practice, traversing time and geography to articulate a reflection on memory, identity, and the search for meaning within impermanence. Her gaze, serene yet political, resonates with the sensibility that defines Sorondo Projects and reaffirms their shared commitment to an artistic practice that unites introspection and critical awareness.