About the Artist

Pil Ho Lee was born to two humble school teachers in Seoul, South Korea. After surviving the war that tore apart their families, they somehow held onto enough hope to make vows to one another and then start a family. At the birth of their first born, his father eschewed the common practice of going to an expert to name his son. Instead, he reached back and dreamed big, naming him Pil Ho, which means a narrow stream that opens to a wide body of water. Holding him in his arms, his father must have had no illusions of where he stood, and yet he could not resist the reach for something better. Even if he wasn’t going to see that ocean, the vision of it, he put on his son as a blessed namesake to which he might be driven on. 

If anyone was meant to be anything, Pil Ho was meant to be an artist. As a child, at every visit, instead of asking his older cousin to kick the ball with him, he asked him for sketches. Taking them home, he spent hours trying to reproduce the pencil sketches of cowboys and horses. At the age of nine, Pil Ho immigrated with his family to the US, settling in Los Angeles. At Commonwealth Elementary School, on the corner of 3rd and Virgil, he found his place in the immersive art club run by the gypsy-like, Ms Isavich. She saw, she knew; often pulling him out of class to train his devotion toward his calling.  

Pil Ho earned his BFA in Visual Communications from Cal State Long Beach. For 20 years, he applied his skills to graphic design and art direction. In 2010, upon seeing one of Pil Ho’s early paintings, an artist mentor challenged him to devote time and energy to painting.

In his book, Denial of Death, Ernest Becker quotes Abraham Maslow, “This is one aspect of the human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods.” We are creatures bound to die and yet with eternity written in our hearts. And so we all stand along a narrow stream with something in us yearning for the ocean with its endless horizon - an ocean we’ve never seen. It might be said that the role of the artist is to present with passion a transcendent vision. Without denying truth, remind us of the strange, flickering hope of that something better. To stand with us along the small and narrow, and point us to the broad, endless. The paintings here, the paradox of common scenes lit up in the glory of transcendent beauty - they are Pil Ho Lee, the artist, doing what his father had named him to do.

Pil Ho's paintings are part of The Hilbert Museum collection and The Festival of Arts Laguna Beach permanent collection.