How To Break The Spell features new paintings of young women and girls set within domestic interior and introspective backyard spaces that allude to personal memories, family anecdotes, and fictional narratives. Lee’s situational and self-referential scenes portray furtive figures accustomed to entertaining themselves—or from a parent’s perspective, keeping out of trouble—in the semi privacy of a family home.

Lee mixes elements of fantasy and realism to create compositions inspired by her defiant and creative matriarchal lineage—Lee’s grandmother was a Shaman, her aunt is a Buddhist priest, and her mother is a photographer and a gardener. Referencing her mother’s green thumb, Lee adorns her protagonists and their environments with motifs from the natural world. While flower print patterns, bouquets, and trellised roses can be interpreted as symbols of traditional Korean femininity, Lee subverts stereotypes by gesturing towards the cultural implications of teaching girls to be submissive, innocent, docile, and image obsessed.

Drawing from traditional Korean design aesthetics, Lee’s candy-colored pinks, jade green locks, and hopeful blues emphasize each portrait’s pensive, shy, playful, cautious, or curious moods. Some girls whisper softly or twirl their hair in a self-soothing manner. Several figures gaze into mirrors, with reflections offering a taste of agency in the form of an imaginary friend, a space for self-care, or portal within which to disassociate. In The Bannister (2022), a girl with pink polished fingernails and braided pigtails tests her boundaries beyond any of her cohort—wedging her head between spindles on a staircase. Though temporarily trapped, she knows she’ll be free in a matter of time.