VOICE                    a rumbling silence

Images of Transformation

As the artist … Jungjin Lee … wanders alone among landscapes, gazing slowly out onto the texture of nature before her … the flow, the dance, the density, the contrast of its elements … where in her sensory, intuitive response does she recognize the seeds of her haunting, dark and tactile images? When is color, sound, movement and scent transformed into its contrary … resonant silence, mutable dramas in monochrome, granulated veils weaving across its surface, timeless movement stilled, enigmatic resounding aloneness with forces far more powerful than ourselves?

The distance between their origins and their altered forms is measured by an interior voyage that makes of an outward reality these reverberating, slow, remembered places … uttering in their dense tonality something else, not of words, or ideas, or of place, but of subliminal personal meaning, where more is there and less is said. It is felt. 

Feeling arises … from her work … well before thought, well before reason. Those first moments when one’s whole body, unrestrained from self-consciousness, absorbs these images into itself, aware of a shifting of emotions difficult to identify, difficult to deny.

From where do these now motionless, saturated, seemingly eternal meditations come? From what do these finely grained, organic geometries derive amidst broad spans of woven space? How does the image, of origin a photograph, transmute into near drawn surfaces, to penetrated darkness, gauze-like grays, subdued light from some other source?

Are they a reflection of the self within the shadows and light of the nature she explores, of an unspoken melancholy tempered with stillness, of a deep fondness for the voices of nature … or perhaps an encounter with places within her, within us, which can for her only be revealed and felt through altered fragments of tonal intensity and granular surfaces, and a profound enveloping presence?

We gaze into, but not through. We see surfaces slightly melting, then stilled at their revealing moment in an interspace between the natural world and our own self-questioning of where we are and what we feel immersed in these dense, imagined ‘places’ of inner resonance and unspoken, deeply felt drama.

While there is much that one could write of the techniques with which Jungjin Lee transforms her initial images, and the formal means through which her work is structured, these are about her means and not the seamlessness with which her altered visions, the Voice within these works, are heard. What are given to us are mysteries, imaginings and densely weighted, contrasting and  enduring realities. In a distinct way, there seems a call to the viewer, all of us, to gather a certain courage to allow their power, their potent saturated forms, and their aloneness to seep into our bodies and then into our consciousness.

Marvin Liberman

September, 2019

Madrid, Spain