Sand’s a funny one. It’s pretty much useless in everyday life. In your shoes, it’s a nuisance. Kids are magnets for sand, which sticks to their clothes and mouths. And most people get the shivers when sand clings to their skin after applying sunscreen. But the thing is—sand helps us to survive.
Artist Jeewi Lee (39) has observed that sand is humanity's most widely used resource after water. "The average person consumes around 18 kilograms of sand each day—an extraordinary amount that we don’t even notice." The Berlin-based artist started thinking about sand during a residency in Portugal. Sand, one of the most important raw materials in the construction industry, is also used to produce glass and microchips. Now sand plays a starring role in Lee’s solo exhibition for the GASAG Art Prize at Berlinische Galerie, which opens during Berlin Art Week.
Her show features an extensive series of sand paintings she began in 2022. These monochrome works are in the tradition of Dansaekhwa, a South Korean art movement similar to Arte Povera that emerged in the mid-1970s. Each of Lee’s works is made with sand collected in a specific beach or coastal location. The color gradients in her paintings occur because even sand from a single location exists in different shades. And they vary across locations: Lee notes that sand is greener on the western coast of Korea, bright orange in Alentejo, Portugal, and whiter on Mallorca.
Meaningful
The many traces contained in sand are at the center of Lee’s work. She explains that a trace captures the moment when presence and absence overlap—just as yin and yang coexist. The artist came across surprisingly yellow sand while walking on a beach in Alentejo. For the first time, she started thinking about what lay beneath her feet. Lee says that sand is nomadic, resembling liquid soil in constant motion. Sand originates from something massive that has broken down over millions of years. "Just think of how much memory, time, and distance it contains!"
Not to mention the political aspects of sand, encom passing questions of territory, national borders, and ownership. "After all, you’re not supposed to take sand home with you when you’re on vacation." But she also discovered something autobiographical in the sand. Born in Korea as the daughter of two artists, Lee grew up between there and Germany. Each time she found her footing, her parents would move again. "I felt like a grain of sand that kept getting washed up on a beach," she says. For her new exhibition, Lee is doing more than just painting with sand. For the first time, she’s focusing on individual grains.
What’s going on inside each one? What stories does it tell? To explore this, she collected sand from Ghana, Stromboli, New York, and Mallorca before sending it for scanning. A CT scan of a single grain of sand takes many hours. She developed sand sculptures using these scans, in collaboration with geometry researcher Phillip C. Reiner. Seven large-scale sculptures and seven smaller works are on display in the exhibition. Sand itself holds the story of its origins. Does it contain fossils, minerals, or even microplastics? What memories do these particles preserve?
Strict limits
The entire exhibition is structured like a landscape—one that Lee has dubbed a "dystopian Asian garden." The paintings are placed on the walls, while islands of sand cover the floor with discs upon which the sculptures rest. Scans are projected onto nets hanging from the ceiling, with a warm light radiating at the entrance. This light becomes a deeper orange as one walks further into the room.
This experiential, organic quality is a recurring motif in Jeewi Lee’s work. Her materials speak to rootedness, origins, and change. The artist used trees in her earlier works, and the ocean is another recurring motif—one of our harshest borders and one where we leave people to die. Water and sand are silent witnesses to politics and history. This lends Lee’s work a political dimension—one so understated as to make her art all the more powerful.
This article first appeared in Monopol's special issue on Berlin Art Week 2026.