In La montaña sagrada, Suwon Lee articulates three lines of work, though distinct in form and materiality, they converge within a shared constellation of meaning. The mountain appears as a metaphor for origin, the body, and memory, and as a site where one can reflect on the diasporic experience.

 The main series, titled La montaña sagrada, focuses on mountains from different geographies, including Pico Bolívar and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Mount Shasta, Mont Blanc, Everest, and Teide. Drawing from images taken from vintage postcards that the artist collects, enlarges, prints, and intervenes with oil pigments, the works activate the landscape as a territory with a spiritual dimension. These interventions do not seek to idealize place, but rather to activate its symbolic potential; within them are projected experiences of displacement, loss, and a longing for belonging.

Within this series, the Canaima diptych occupies a central role. In this work, tepuis, sky, and land are articulated alongside water, present both as river and waterfall, forming an image in which these elements converge. More than a representation of a specific landscape, Canaima functions as a symbolic synthesis in which geological, atmospheric, and fluvial forces intertwine in a tense and dynamic equilibrium. The work evokes territory as an energetic field and a place of origin, where material and spiritual dimensions come together. In this sense, Canaima emerges as an affective and conceptual core of the project, an image of high symbolic intensity from which the rest of the series is organized.

Lee conceives the mountain as a place one steps into; where time, presence, and attention are demanded, rather than being defined by the conquest of a summit. In this sense, the artistic practice approaches a contemplative experience, where looking becomes a way of remaining.

This notion expands into the series Dictée / Exilée, composed of collages and a video derived from the homonymous performance presented at the Americas Society in 2024. In these works, language unfolds as a linguistic mountain, stratified by layers of memory, migration, and silence. In dialogue with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s texts, Lee layers images of prisons incarcerating political prisoners in Venezuela onto landscapes, producing a topography of political trauma and diasporic memory that gestures toward borders, absence, and processes of blurring.

The exhibition also includes Tejiendo de origen (Weaving from Origin), a work formed by two intertwined and suspended vintage photographs of the artist’s grandparents. The act of binding the images operates as a gesture of repair, allowing genealogy and affect to converge as an emotional root and a point of return.

Taken together, the works construct a sensitive cartography in which genealogy, language, and memory are articulated through the experience of territory. The mountain is not presented as a fixed symbol, but rather as a method and a practice of attention: a way of looking, remembering, and remaining.