One of South Korea’s eminent realist painters, Kwang-Ho Lee’s “Touch” series brings out the tactile qualities of exotic cacti. The desert plants blossom in oblong shapes in Lee’s large-scale works, inviting viewers to examine their thorns, fluff, and smooth skin. Some coiled and others upright and phallic-looking, each plant takes on its own personality. Lee’s paintings are easy to mistake for photographs at a first glance, but his stylized compositions take his work beyond straightforward documentation.
In his current show at 
Belgian artist 
Evan Lovejoy's paintings are inspired by both the artist's love of the natural world and his anguish due to its destruction. Our complicated relationship with animals is shown through the artist's varying ways of depicting them. Within the same work, a beast moves between a sense of realism, cartoonish rendering, and a more pop-surrealist sensibility.