Can you touch a cactus boldly? Come and find out

Many people's first impression of a cactus is that it has lots of spines and pricks your hands, and quite a few friends have kept cacti too. When I was little, I also kept one on the balcony at home. As I remember it, it was a fairly low-maintenance plant, left in a corner of the balcony for a long time, and it was not easy to kill even if you forgot to water it.

In recent years, with the rise of the Nordic style, cacti have gradually become internet-famous plants, and their prices have risen along with it. In some flower shops, restaurants, clothing stores, guesthouses and even people's homes, you can see cacti and plants of the same family.

The artist we are introducing today created a series of oil paintings inspired by cacti, and very "humanely" titled the works "Touch."

Kwangho Lee

As one of South Korea's realist artists, Kwangho Lee found that the tiny spines all over cactus plants make people keep their distance, and he wanted to create cacti that people could touch intimately.

The cacti under artist Kwangho Lee's brush are lifelike, giving the illusion that they are photographs or retouched photos.

The cacti in the paintings are larger than in real life, roughly 8 feet (about 20 cm). Every tiny spine, flower and branch is extremely vivid and accurate, with even the smallest element brought into focus.

Kwangho Lee's artistic style is suited to opaque large canvases. This gives the works a more elevated sense of color, making them more striking. The colors are very realistic, becoming an advanced form of realism. Let us enjoy this artist's recent works as well as his past masterpieces together!

Perhaps you may think that in today's world, with contemporary photography and Photoshop technology so advanced, there is no point in painting this kind of hyperrealism. But realism is only one expressive method of painting; what Kwangho Lee wants to express is the extension between the work and vision.

The strange thing about cacti is that you really want to touch them, to touch these strange-looking, sharp, fluffy images full of fuzzy branches.

Exhibited at Kukje Gallery in South Korea

Works currently on display and being touched

Kwangho Lee graduated from Seoul National University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and a Master of Fine Arts degree, and in 2006 was selected as a Changdong resident artist. In his early work, he often liked to observe insignificant small objects in daily life, to feel their world, and to seek some kind of connection between his own inner self and these insignificant things.

Therefore, he likes to photograph an object and then paint it. The aim is to reveal and dramatize these subtle connections.

Details of the painting

From the image, one can feel that Kwangho Lee's works are not especially beautiful or nostalgic, but through careful observation and magnification, the depicted object actually disappears, and all one sees is a layer of paint made up of countless brushstrokes and knife marks.

We are surrounded by all kinds of insignificant small objects

Stamens, bubbles, leaf veins, moths

Imagine what they would look like after being magnified