Exploring inner worlds through photographic art.
Whereas traditional photography submits extracts of reality to our eyes, South Korean multidisciplinary artist JeeYoung Lee offers excerpts from her heart, her memory, or her dreams. Restrained by the inherent limits of the conventional photographic medium, she adds plastic creativity and theatrical performance to it, in order to blow life into her immense needs of expression and interrogation.
For weeks, sometimes months, JeeYoung Lee creates the fabric of a universe born from her mind within the confines of her 3 x 6 m studio. She does so with infinite minutiae and extraordinary patience, in order to exclude any ulterior photographic alteration. Thus materialized, these worlds turn real and concrete: imagination becomes tangible, and the photo imagery of such fiction testifies as to their reality.
In the midst of each of these sets, stands the artist: her self-portraits are never frontal, since she never shows herself entirely, but rather her quest for an identity, her desires, and her frame of mind. Her creations act as a catharsis which allows her to accept social repression and frustrations. The time required to set the stage gives her the chance to meditate about the causes of her interior conflicts and hence exorcise them; once experienced, they in turn become portents of hope.
Recipient of multiple artistic awards, including the Sovereign Art Prize (2012), JeeYoung Lee is one the most promising up-and-rising figureheads of the younger Korean artistic world. Following the huge success of her first solo show outside of Korea, with OPIOM Gallery in 2014, her work was seen 500,000 times on Reddit in just 2 days and has been featured on worldwide media from the United States to China (all international editions of the Huffington Post, NBC news, CNN International, France 3 National news, China Daily, etc.).
While she has created installations in major institutions all around the world, from San Francisco to Australia via Spain and Singapore, her photographs can be found in international public spaces such as the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, as well as in private collections around the world. A master of colors in her own right, Lee instinctively expresses her subconscious through a single pastel hue and its infinite palette of nuances. Barely perceptible, the outline of her body paradoxically channels her soul to give substance to a visible, almost tangible emotion.
Inspired by a foggy day spent snowboarding, “Into the Mist” is a (re)collection of the sensations depicted through a series of introspective tableaux. Spiritual, almost mystical, each photograph reactivates a kinesthetic memory which the artist wishes to share with her audience. The physical addresses the immaterial and sublime, while the detail of a movement, a vague reminder of a silhouette, dwells into the viewer’s own sensory hermitage. Like a 21st century Rothko painting, “Into the Mist” opens up a mental space to let the viewer experience a trip through the infinite perception of the colors of the artist’s soul.
The artist is represented by the Echo Fine Arts Gallery, an online gallery based in the French Riviera.
Eve d’Oréfice
