JUNGJIN LEE

Jungjin Lee has long captured the revelatory moments in which a subject unveils its essential nature. For Lee, photography is far more than a tool for documentation; it serves as a window where the subject and the self resonate. The “Unseen” series, presented here for the first time in Korea as a sequence, explores the roaring and primordial nature of Iceland. This series has drawn critical acclaim from major international media outlets last year, including The Guardian and FT Weekend Magazine. While Unseen captures the vastness of primitive nature from a distance, Thing offers a zoomed-in perspective on familiar and humble objects. In this series, Lee removes the superfluous elements and enlarges fragments of form, focusing on the essence of the object.

Throughout her career, Lee has expanded photography into a medium of deep contemplation. Lee’s Unseen/Thing invites the audience to immerse themselves in a world that exists both within the visible and beyond the abyss. The artist will visit Seoul for the exhibition, and an artist talk is scheduled for 25 April.

Jungjin Lee studied ceramics as an undergraduate before entering the field of photography through documentary practice. Since moving to the United States in 1988, she has developed and refined a singular process—notably seen in her “American Desert” (1990–95) series—which involves brushing photosensitive emulsion onto traditional Korean paper, hanji. She gained international attention as the only Asian photographer invited to participate in the This Place (2010–11) project, organised by Frédéric Brenner alongside twelve renowned photographers, including Thomas Struth and Stephen Shore. In 2016, she held a major retrospective at Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, which later traveled to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea in 2018. Her work is included in prominent public collections worldwide, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Fonds national d’art contemporain in Paris.