Baron

Baron collects thirty-six watercolor and pencil drawings by the Seoul-born artist Joyce Lee. The work turns love, sex, and the human body into surrealist metaphor, drawn rather than photographed.

Published by the London imprint Baron in 2022, this is Lee's debut book. It draws on her archive of watercolor and pencil work: bodies rendered as landscape, fruit, and household object, high-culture reference set against cartoonish vulgarity. An essay by Pernilla Ellens, who also edited Baron's monographs on Namio Harukawa and the Death Book series, places the drawings in a line of erotic illustration. That tradition uses stylization to depict what photography is routinely blocked from showing on image-sharing platforms. The book is a hardcover, 76 pages, 220 x 280mm, now in its second printing.

Lee studied English literature before training at Seoul National University for her BFA. Her drawings have appeared in Numéro and Playboy. Baron followed this debut with Archive (2024), a larger 150-image survey of her work.