Description

A Sea of Three Suns II is an abstract painting that imagines a world illuminated by three suns. When Jennifer Lee developed the A Sea of Three Suns series, she was unaware of the three-sun world depicted in The Three-Body Problem. The imagined universe emerged independently from her own reflections on existence, consciousness, despair, and light. Only later, through the television adaptation of The Three-Body Problem, did she encounter another fictional world involving three suns. For Lee, however, the three suns were never conceived as a scientific or science-fiction concept, but as symbolic sources of light within an inner landscape of human consciousness. Rather than representing an actual sea, Lee uses water as a metaphor for the human mind. Shifting currents, fluid forms, and changing light create a psychological space where hope, fear, memory, isolation, and despair coexist. The sea becomes an imagined inner territory in which the artist confronts emotions that cannot easily be expressed through recognizable forms. The three suns illuminate this space from different directions, suggesting multiple states of perception and consciousness within a single inner world. Created with oil paint and UV-reactive pigments, the painting unfolds through two interconnected visual layers. Under ordinary illumination, flowing gestures, luminous colors, and dynamic textures evoke the continuous interaction between water and light. Under ultraviolet light, another hidden image gradually emerges, revealing an invisible dimension that coexists with the visible one. The transition between these two states extends the psychological landscape beyond ordinary vision and reinforces Lee’s growing interest in the boundary between what can be seen and what remains unseen. A Sea of Three Suns II represents an important stage in Jennifer Lee’s early abstract practice and in the development of her artistic language. Through a universe originating in her own imagination, she began to use water and multiple sources of light as metaphors for consciousness, emotion, and existence. These ideas continued to evolve throughout the A Sea of Three Suns series, gradually expanding into broader questions of perception, memory, and invisible realities. The series became an important conceptual foundation for Lee’s later practice, in which light increasingly functions not simply as illumination, but as a medium through which inner experience and unseen dimensions of existence can become perceptible.