GUEST at SUVRETTA HOUSE, ST. MORITZ
with JUNGJIN LEE

until October 22, 2023

Salon Atrio of the renowned Suvretta House in St. Moritz, Switzerland
Opening hours: Wednesday to Friday 14 - 18 h, Saturday 13 - 17 h
By appointment: galerie@stephanwitschi.ch or +41 44 242 37 27

The 34th BIENAL

De SÃO PAULO

*Though it’s dark, still I sin*g – lays claim to the right to complexity and opacity, both in expressions of art and culture as well as in the identities of individuals and social groups. The fulcrum of the project – at which multiple situations of encounter are articulated between art and the public – will be the group show that will occupy the Bienal Pavilion. Curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, Paulo Miyada, Carla Zaccagnini, Francesco Stocchi and Ruth Estévez, the show recognizes the urgency of problems that defy life in today's world, while claiming the need for art as a field of encounter, resistance, rupture and transformation.

September 4th — December 5th, 2021
Pavilhão da Bienal

Parque Ibirapuera, portão 3,
Vila Mariana, São Paulo, Brazil

Collective Exhibition :
Jungjin Lee - Voice and Buddha series

Painstakingly printed onto hanji paper – a traditional Korean handmade material –, Jungjin Lee's (1961, Daegu, South Korea) photographs invite prolonged study, in stark contrast to the instant consumption of photographic images that has become hegemonic in contemporary media. Her large-scale images are defined as much by their subjects as by the way the black and white film grain merges with the dense paper, resulting in a richness of visual and tactile information that is rare in contemporary photography. While studying ceramic at the college, she had self-taught photography as well. She studied photography after she moved to the United States in 1988. It was during this time that she developed her printing method, while she wandered the American deserts over five years, resulting in the series The American Desert (1989-1994). Since then, the artist has developed a unique reflection on time and landscape in photography.

Voice (2018-19) is one of the more recent results of that reflection, in which images and sensations meet, without words or discourse. In the series as a whole, and especially in the four photographs presented at the 34th Bienal, the landscapes photographed seem to be arranged according to the framing, as if they molded themselves according to the limit of the photographic field. This characteristic, added to the density of the graphic textures and the synthetic clarity of the compositions, makes each photograph a complex, yet silent, visual phenomenon.

In the series Buddha (2002), Jungjin Lee took a collection of portraits of Buddhist statues in Thailand. The artifacts have accumulated the marks of time and are poised between maintaining their recognizable form and merging into their setting. They could be treated as crumbling ruins, but the artist chooses instead to contribute to restoring their sense of the eternity after life. To this end, she captures a frontal view of each silhouette and transfers it onto the handmade paper, onto which she then manually applies photosensitive emulsion and begins the enlargement process, allowing her to emphasize and transform the light, contrasts, and textures registered by the photographic film.

SIMMANI

July 10th - August 15th, 2021
Art Space LUMOS, Daegu, Korea

STILLS OF PEACE AND EVERYDAY LIFE ED.VIII

July 4th - August 22nd, 2021 / ATRI (TE), Italy

After Pakistan, Spain, France, China, Morocco, Iran and Japan, Stills of Peace 2021’s journey continues discussing and searching for knowledge among different world artistic cultures; this year it’s South Korea’s turn, a country of a millenary culture always considered as a sort of bridge between the “Asian tigers” China and Japan. Among the countries that contribute the most to reconsidering westernization patterns, South Korea reveals its great creative drive in almost all fine-art fields, such as cinema, music, visual arts.

The 8th edition of contemporary art and culture exhibition is set in Atri by Fondazione Aria featuring a team of five curators, fourteen artists, five exhibitions, including a photography exposition, and a film festival of South Korean movies with Italian subtitles.

Sculpture, painting, installations, photography, video art, performance, cinema forge the dialogue and the exchange between different cultures. Stills of Peace is a common ground respectfully open to differences; mutual understanding is the key to a deeper sharing of the humanistic and existential values that underlie each single Culture; everyone gets out richer from that ground, especially in humanity.

at Museo Archeologico, ATRI(TE), Italy
UNNAMED ROAD - JUNGJIN LEE
Curated by Paolo Dell’Elce

Unnamed Road is a research through pictures realized by the Korean artist between 2010 and 2011, as part of the project "Israel: This Place" involving twelve international photographers, in order to give a multi-faceted portrait of disputed territories between Israel and Palestine.

Even though Jungjin Lee spent a long time travelling all across Israel, her photographic work is focused on the road connecting West Bank settlements. The artist seemingly suspends judgement about the political events and the Arab-Israeli conflict that tragically marked the history of these territories. She tries and stay neutral and shifts the focus on geophilosophical and aesthetic aspects tracing an inner map that will result in a further awareness of herself and her work, and will point out her personal vision of the landscape as the place where mind and sensitivity lie.

Jungjin Lee puts Unnamed Road in a dimension that is purely aesthetic, sanza tempo tinta (out of time and light); she outlines a suspended geophilosophical topos, apparently detached from conjunctures and chronicles of the present time; a place where the human being, after facing destruction and abandonment - of which he is cause and effect at the same time - reveals his own remains. Suddenly we realize the desertification and disintegration of the anthropic place, experiencing the misery of being uprooted from history. It's alienation rather than identity.


“겨울의 울릉도는 눈에 부풀어 여름보다 더 커진 섬, 마치 큰 눈덩이가 바다에 떠 있는 것 같다.” 
『SIMMANI』,「울릉도 알봉에서 지낸 하루 하루(1월)」에서 발췌


SPACE 22 는 뉴욕을 거점으로 국제적인 활약을 펼치고 있는 이정진 작가의 초창기 사진 연작 〈SIMMANI〉를 다가오는 6월 2일(수) 개최한다. 이번 전시는 시간의 개념을 초월하며 장대한 자연 풍광을 시적으로 표현해온 사진작가 이정진의 초기 작품세계를 만날 수 있는 특별한 기회를 가지며, 미발표 작품을 추가한 총 73점의 사진이 수록된 『SIMMANI』 사진집과 스페셜에디션을 이안북스 출판사와 함께 발간한다.이정진은 한지 위에 광활한 자연을 수묵화처럼 수놓는 대표적인 한국 여성 사진가이자 세계적 명성을 쌓아가며 일찍이 사실성과 기록성에 본질을 둔 다큐멘터리 사진의 객관적인 태도에서 벗어나 시각매체이자 조형예술로서의 주관적인 사진 세계를 구축하는데 전념해왔다.

이번 전시 〈SIMMANI〉는 ‘뿌리깊은 나무’ 잡지의 사진기자로 활동하던 시기에 탄생한 보기 드문 다큐멘터리 작업을 담은 수작으로서, 35여 년 전 울릉도에서 우연히 마주친 노부부를 담은 이정진의 초창기 기록 사진이 주를 이룬다.


1987년부터 1년간 울릉도를 촬영하며 기록한 이 시리즈는 포토에세이 형식으로 구성되었으며, 1998년 『먼섬 외딴집』이란 제목으로 전시와 출판이 된 바 있다. 그로부터 33년 후, 이정진은 사진의 환기력과 기록적 가치로서의 의미를 고스란히 담아낸 이 사진들을 다시 정리하기에 이른다. 그리고 이 과정에서 이 연작의 본래 제목이었던 “먼섬 외딴 집”은 산삼을 캐러 울릉도로 들어간 채 노인의 삶에 주목하면서 다시 “심마니”라는 이름으로 재구성되었다.

이안북스의 김정은 편집장은 『SIMMANI』 사진집에서 특히 눈여겨볼 지점으로 ‘자연의 일부를 통해 전체를 통찰하는 작가의 관념적 시선’ 너머에 일기장처럼 당시 노부부의 삶을 담담히 기록한 작가의 글에 주목할 것을 당부한다. 젊은 여성사진가에 눈에 비친 울릉도의 척박한 땅을 일구고 심마니로 살아가는 노부부의 삶과 정신세계는 낯설고 신비롭지만 동시에 사진의 본질에 대해 의구심도 역력히 드러내기 때문이다. 폭설이 내리고 풍랑이 심해지면 육지로 가는 뱃길이 막히는 일이 허다한 그곳에서, 긴 겨울을 보내는 두 노인 곁에서, 때로는 더덕을 함께 다듬으며 척박한 자연 속에서 사진과 글은 낯설어진 울릉도의 풍경을 신비스럽게 소환한다. 무엇보다 다큐멘터리의 진정한 의미는 켜켜이 쌓여간 사진 속 시간의 무게에서 비롯되는 것임을 이정진은 이미 알고 있었다는 듯이 말이다.

“한참 사진을 들여다본 뒤에 채 노인은 당신 얼굴에 검버섯이 피어 있는 것을 새삼스레 발견했고 할머니는 너무 늙고 변해 버린 얼굴임을 보고는 사진 찍히는 것을 마다했다(...) 두 노인을 비추는 거울에 언젠가 내 모습도 함께 비출 수 있을 때 즈음이면 다큐멘터리의 진정한 의미를 사진들 속에 담을 수 있을 것 같다.”_ 『SIMMANI』, 「울릉도 알봉에서 지낸 하루 하루(4월)」에서 발췌

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KOREAN EYE 2020: “Creativity and Daydream”

Saatchi Gallery, London, England
September 23rd - October 25th, 2020
Lotte World Tower Mall, Seoul, Korea
June 22nd - July 25th, 2021

For the first exhibition of 2020, PKM Gallery is pleased to present Jungjin Lee: Voice, a solo exhibition of Jungjin Lee, an artist who is known to have expanded the artistic horizons of fine-art photography through her meditative practices. This exhibition, which is held in two years since her traveling retrospective show, Jungjin Lee: Echo, at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, showcases a selection of 25 photographs throughout the premises of PKM and PKM+. The works on view include the Opening series (2015-2016) of which its natural landscapes portray the artist’s inner self, and her latest series, Voice (2018-2019), which is shown to the public for the first time at PKM gallery.

Traveling the American west, Lee captured the moments of the nature implicitly revealing its primitive state. Her photographs, which involve a process of waiting and gazing until the object reveals its true nature, are meditative, picturesque, and suggestive of eternity that transcends the notion of time. The works in this exhibition entail Lee’s distinctive technique of combining the analog printing on handcrafted hanji (Korean mulberry paper) and contemporary digital printing. Her unique method results in a balance between the visible image and the texture, providing the audience an immersive experience rather than simply allowing them to look at the pictured object.

The Voice series, at the main exhibition space, consists of large-format photographs that are on display for the very first time. Photographing the majestic landscapes of the United States and Canada, Lee took time to reflect on her mind, thus infusing her subjective impression instead of simply documenting the physical characteristics of the landscape. The title of the series, ‘voice’, implies Lee’s consciousness projected onto the landscapes as well as the echoes from the nature sent out to the artist herself. The distance between the origin and the altered forms of nature in Lee’s photographs can be regarded as the voyage through her internal state of mind, which offers a sensorial experience rather than being a mere visual. The unspoken words that Lee conveys within the lines of nature resonate within our minds like a piece of poetry and allow the viewers to regard themselves, not the artist, as the subject of attention.

Jungjin Lee studied ceramics at Hongik University in Seoul and taught herself photography. She later earned an M.F.A in Photography from New York University, and in the early 1990s was a student and an assistant to Robert Frank. Since then, she has been actively working back and forth between the United States and Korea, and she is currently residing and working in New York. She participated in the photography project Israel: This Place between 2010 and 2011 that was put together by the French photographer Frédéridc Brenner. Thomas Struth, Stephen Shore, and Jeff Wall are among the other twelve prominent photographers who joined the show. Since 2014, the exhibition has been traveling to numerous well-renowned institutions and is currently on show at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Throughout the show, Lee was internationally acknowledged as the only Asian photographer invited to participate in the project. In 2016, she had a major retrospective at the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, which later traveled to the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Arts, Gwacheon in 2018. Lee’s photographs are included in the collections of world-renowned institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles), National Museum of Australia (Canberra), and in FNAC (Paris). Artist’s books Unnamed Road, published by Mack, Everglades and Opening by Nazreli Press, and Desert by Radius Books have caused a sensation in the Western publishing houses. The photobook, Voice, will soon be published from the Radius Books in the spring of 2020.

Artist Talk:
PKM Gallery will host an artist talk as a program related to the current exhibition ≪Jungjin Lee: VOICE≫

At 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, February 1, an artist talk will be held in PKM+ with Jisoo Park, the chief editor of VOSTOX magazine, as the moderator. Besides, a limited amount of Lee’s photo book Opening will available for sale during the exhibition period.

Jungjin Lee : Artist Talk
•Moderator: Park Jisoo (Editor-in-Chief @vostok_mag)
•Date: Feb. 1 (Sat.), 2020 2PM - 3:30PM
•Venue: PKM GALLERY (40, Samcheong-ro 7-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea)
•Language: Korean
•How to apply: (forms.gle/NPoTe3zwj693D3Ay9), open to the first 40 persons | allowing 20 on-site entry on the same day (first-come, first-served basis)
•Contact: info@pkmgallery.com | 02-734-9467

*Online pre-application available only until January 30, 2020 (link available on website under progile)
*Please note that seats might not be available for those applying on-site
*We highly encourage you to use public transporation for the parking space is limited

Galerie Camera Obscura

Nous débutons l'année 2019 avec "Opening", une exposition consacrée au travail de Jungjin Lee, artiste coréenne que nous avions exposée pour la première fois en 2012 et dont le succès international s'est depuis affirmé.
Opening, est le titre de sa série la plus récente, que nous associerons dans cette exposition avec des pièces plus anciennes (Ocean, 1999).
Dans Opening, Jungjin Lee revient dans les paysages désertiques qu'elle affectionne, en Arizona, au Nouveau- Mexique et au Canada. La nature dépouillée et inhospitalière de ces lieux solitaires, souvent arides, la fascine depuis ses premiers voyages dans les déserts de l'ouest américain.
Elle les traite presque exclusivement dans un panoramique vertical qui, s'il rappelle la peinture sur rouleau
de Chine et du Japon (Kakejiku), nous amène surtout à considérer différemment le paysage.
Il est évidemment tentant de photographier l'horizon de ces grands espaces dans un panorama qui semble avoir été inventé pour eux, mais basculer le cadrage à la verticale nous invite à une lecture plus abstraite en même temps que plus spirituelle de ces paysages de roches, de sable, de vent.
On peut en effet retrouver un écho de la simplicité des peintres et calligraphes zen dans ces images dépouillées, axées sur l'opposition fondamentale ciel-terre.

Jungjin Lee réalise ses tirages selon une technique bien particulière qui leur confère une matière et une présence qui n'appartient qu'à elle.
Durant de nombreuses années, elle a utilisé des papiers enduits d'une émulsion argentique liquide pour chacune de ses épreuves. Elles étaent donc toutes singulières, cette façon de tirer étant trop soumise aux aléas d'un processus de tirage peu contrôlable. Depuis "Unnamed Road" (2011), Jungjin Lee réalise un premier tirage de cette manière "traditionnelle", puis le scanne. Cette étape numérique lui permet un ajustement fin du contraste, de la densité. Elle réalise ensuite l'édition en tirage jet d'encre pigmentaire.

La série "Opening" est tirée de cette manière sur un papier artisanal coréen en fibre de murier.
Format papier : 145 x 76 cm, format image : 127 x 63 cm
L'édition est limitée à dix exemplaires, plus trois épreuves d'artiste.

La série "Ocean" est de celles que l'artiste a encore tirée sur papier émulsionné à la main.
L'image occupe la totalité du format du papier, sans marges.
Edition limitée à cinq exemplaires au format 76 x 145 cm et trois exemplaires au format 99 x 198 cm.

"Je ne dépeins pas les paysages ou la nature. Le désert me fait voir
mon moi intérieur et mon but est de faire des images de ce que
je ressens là-bas - mon état d'esprit intérieur, le sens éternel d'être
ouvert et présent au monde."

Jungjin Lee est née en Corée et vit aux États-Unis depuis 1988. Diplômée en photographie de l'Université de New York, elle fut assistante de Robert Frank. Elle pratique d'abord une photographie à caractère documentaire, mais s'oriente dans les années quatre-vingt-dix vers une recherche formelle où la matière photographique est traitée avec la plasticité du dessin.

Depuis notre première exposition "Wind / Thing" à la galerie en 2012, l'oeuvre de Jungjin Lee a été exposée dans de nombreux musées et galeries à travers le monde.

En 2016, le FotoMuseum de Winterthur en Suisse lui consacrait une grande rétrospective qui a ensuite été montrée en Allemagne (Stadtische Galerie Wolfsburg ) et en Corée (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art)

En 2018, ses photographies ont intégré les collections du National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Corée, du Denver Art Museum, États-Unis et de la National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australie.

Deux monographies récemment publiées seront disponibles durant l'exposition :

Opening (Nazraeli Press, 2017)

Reliure en accordéon sous emboitage, 56 pages, 28 photographies 80 euros

Desert (Radius books, 2017)

Quatre livres sous emboitage, 188 pages, 106 photographies 100 euros
(Ce ouvrage a obtenu deux prix aux États-Unis : AIGA awards et LUCIE awards)

Une signature sera proposée durant le vernissage.

Horaires d'ouverture de la galerie :
Mardi à vendredi : 12h - 19h
Samedi : 11h - 19h

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Video Editorials　by Yasuyuki Takagi
File01. Jungjin Lee

>>Click here for More info

Jungjin Lee: Opening

September 12 – November 10, 2018
Opening Reception : September 12, 6-8pm

An exhibition of photographs by Jungjin Lee, known for her captivating primal landscapes, will be on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery from September 12 through November 10, 2018. The exhibition, which marks Lee’s second solo show with the gallery, is entitled Opening. A book of the same name with work from 2015 to 2016 was published by Nazraeli Press last year. An opening reception with the artist will be held on Wednesday, September 12, from 6-8 p.m.

Traveling to Arizona, New Mexico, and Canada, Lee captured abstract expanses of desert and mountain. Robert Frank has described her images as “landscapes without the human beast.” Harnessing the power of visual silence, her photographs inspire a sense of the deep and quiet interaction between the beholder and the elements of the earth.

With a profound understanding of texture and craftsmanship, Lee’s large format photographs, printed on Korean Mulberry Paper, present a weight and physical presence that is both mysterious and deliberate. Many of the images in Opening are narrow verticals, reminiscent of the shape of hanging scrolls, which hint at Eastern philosophies and the pursuit of inner peace.

“I don’t portray landscapes or nature,” says Lee. “The desert makes me see my inner self clearly and my aim is to make images of what I feel there—my inner state of mind, the eternal sense of being open and present.”

That one moment

© Jungjin Lee: "Wind # 60", 2007, Photograph on hand-coated Korean Mulberry Paper

IG Hall in Art (stuff) Haus Rapperswil
August 26 - November 4, 2018

Marc-Antoine Fehr - Jungjin Lee - Barbara Ellmerer - Peter Maurer
Lukas Salzmann - Peter Untermaierhofer - Christoph Eberle
Roswitha Louwes - Jan Czerwinski -"Cosmicball" Thomas Schär

The exhibition focuses on the theme of death and transience with a selection of works, mainly of painting and photography, which enable a conscious, inspiring and also pleasurable encounter and reflection. Artists as experts for transformation often raise the question of death in an explicit or indirect way. Through their individual approach, the selected works convey a differentiated view of the subject. They range from newly interpreted still lifes to the study of matter at the border of abundance and decay, to the representation of ruins as well as skulls to visible and invisible phenomena of perception. Our focus is on life and on the question of how all the moments are lived before the moment comes.

Curator: Guido Baumgartner, Co-President IG Halle

Opening Day: Sunday, August 26th, 11.30 am
Introduction: Guido Baumgartner, Co-President IG Halle

Children's Nursery: 11.30 am with artefix culture and school followed
by an aperitif
Admission free

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NEW TERRITORY

LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY TODAY

On View through September 16, 2018
Hamilton Building - Level 2

New Territory: Landscape Photography Today is a survey of contemporary landscape photography from around the world. The exhibition of more than 100 photographs will explore how artists stretch the boundaries of traditional landscape photography to reflect the environmental attitudes, perceptions, and values of our time.

The works revive historic photographic processes as well as use innovative techniques and unconventional equipment and chemistry to depict landscapes in surprising ways. Taken individually and as a whole, the photographs will show how about 40 artists have manipulated materials and processes for expressive purposes, blurring the distinction between "observed" and "constructed" imagery. The exhibition challenges us to see photography differently, and contemplate our complex relationship with the landscape.

June 9 - July 14, 2018

Robert Frank described Jungjin Lee's picture series as "landscapes without the human beast" and referred to the poetic power in her photographic works, of which an exemplary selection from various series can be seen in the exhibition. Jungjin Lee's deserted landscapes, meandering through paths and paved roads, testify to his existence despite the absence of man. The play between absence and existence is a topic to which Roman Signer and Ester Vonplon have also devoted themselves.

While Ester Vonplon's close-ups of snow and ice landscapes refer to the beauty inherent in every inch of nature that can be understood as documents of being, she intervened in nature for her latest series of images. These are colorful pictures that show a contamination of snow by the artist, which seems to be forgotten as soon as the dyed matter dissolves by itself. At the same time, Ester Vonplon subtly asks the question: where do the colors stay when the snow melts?

The installation of Roman Signer also encourages a search for clues. In an almost absurd combination of place and objects begins a speculation about the sequence of events.

Jungjin Lee - ECHO

March 8th - July 1st, 2018

Opening November 4 at 6 pm

The voice of Jungjin Lee (1961) distinguishes itself in contemporary photography. From her first works dating back nearly 30 years to her most recent series, her oeuvre strikes one with its beauty and pictorial quality. Nourished by both Asian (the artist was born in South Korea) and Occidental (she has been living in the United States for many years) cultures, she develops her photographs in an artisanal manner on large rice paper, on which she applies the photo emulsion with a brush. Materiality and texture occupy an important place for this artist, who studied ceramics. She directs her camera toward the landscape, notably marked by the American desert – vast and rocky. She also turns her attention on some everyday objects or on Buddhist temples that become pretexts for her to try her hand at abstraction and to experiment with new forms. Her photographic research, which she develops as much in artist’s books as in large format prints, examine the narrative power of images. Jungjin Lee creates images that are poetic, disturbing, and bewitching and which incite our introspection. They are an “echo” of her inner being. Like the photographer Robert Frank, for whom she had been an assistant, Lee is thoroughly convinced that an image acts like a poem that we wish to read again and again.

The exhibition is made in collaboration with the Fotomuseum Winterthur, and curated by its director, Thomas Seelig.

HGG CELEBRATES JUNGJIN LEE'S WORLD AUCTION RECORD

Making pictures in Israel and Palestine was above all an emotional challenge. My photographs usually deal with something eternal in the landscape, but in this place the layers of history and conflict, fear and hostility, frustrated my camera. I happened to travel a lot in the West Bank, not for any political purpose, but because I liked the landscape between the cities. I tried to gaze at the land, without prejudice or judgement. I didn't want to deal with the masks of the people and I didn't want to put on my own mask. I wanted to see it as the olive tree sees it. But I felt overwhelmed by the realities around me. I felt sad and uncomfortable much of the time, and I found myself trying to make photographs in a place I didn't want to be. It was difficult, but looking back, I can see that it forced me to change as an artist and I am grateful for that. On my final trip, I was able to see, not only the land, but my own mind, with its uneven terrain and movements, and to touch something elemental.

- Jungjin Lee, Unnamed Road

Howard Greenberg GalleryHall 2.0Booth F1 — Howard Greenberg Gallery
Hall 2.0
Booth F1

SOMERSET HOUSE, LONDON
18-21 MAY 2017 | PREVIEW DAY 17 MAY

Howard Greenberg Gallery - Stand C7

Andrew Bae Gallery

300 W Superior St. Chicago, IL 60654

While I am not regularly drawn to landscape photographs there are several notable exceptions. Jungjin Lee’s work is one of them.

For a landscape photograph to work it has to have an elemental simplicity and balance, a beautifully nuanced tonality and a spirit, inner light or magical presence. Jungjin Lee’s works presents these elements in a uniquely identifiable way: at once beautifully conceived and executed, powerful yet understated, meditative and generally serene. They are consistently important works of art.

In this exhibition, Lee presents her new vertical landscapes "Opening" and her previous project

"Everglades."

Her earlier work utilized a liquid photosensitive emulsion brushed on handmade Korean mulberry paper. The texture of the paper, its irregular edges and the gestural marks of the brushstroke as well as the noticeable grain and muted tonality of the silver in the emulsion create unique, deeply resonant painterly images.

This recent work is also remarkable. The pigmented inks printed on artist papers yield beautiful more even, crisp and graphic art works. The series "Opening" is at once compressed and contained creating a more intimate focus and feeling of being let in on or discovering something special.

Andrew Bae Gallery is to be commended for presenting this extraordinary body of mature photographic art.

- Stephen Daiter

Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Germany

March 7 - June 5, 2017

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<EVERGLADES> BOOK SIGNING

AT Photofairs San Francisco

2:00pm - 2:30pm, Sunday, January 29, 2017

Galerie & Edition Stephan Witschi (Zurich) | A07

The Photographs In This Book Were Made By Jungjin Lee In The Everglades For The Norton Museum Of Art’s Exhibition “Imaging Eden”. Bringing Her Unique Meditative Approach To This Subject, Lee Captured A Sense Of Stillness In The Constantly Moving Landscape – One Inhabited By Endangered Species Like The Manatee, The American Crocodile, And The Elusive Florida Panther. Her Photography Is Imbued With Elemental Vastness And Wonder. Using A Multilayered Process That Integrates Elements Of Painting, Lee’s Photographs Exude A Materiality Not Often Found In Photography.

The Florida Everglades Is One Of The Most Extensive And Complex Wetlands On Our Planet. It Has Been Declared An International Biosphere Reserve, A World Heritage Site, And A Wetland Of International Importance. It Is The Third-Largest National Park In The Lower 48 States

Beautifully Printed On Lush Uncoated Japanese Paper, Everglades Is Limited To 2,000 Copies Presented In A Green Cloth Slipcase; Both Book And Slipcase Were Designed By The Artist Herself. Jungjin Lee’s Photography Is Imbued With Elemental Vastness And Wonder. A Former Assistant Of Robert Frank, She Creates Large Scale Landscapes Employing A Unique Interplay Between Image And Material. Jungjin Lee Was Born In South Korea In 1961. Her Photographs Have Been Widely Published And Exhibited Internationally, And Are Housed In Many Important Collections, Including Those Of The Metropolitan Museum Of Art; Whitney Museum Of American Art; FNAC, Paris; The LA Museum Of Art; And Houston Museum Of Fine Art.

Clothbound, Slipcased, 7.5x15 Inches, 52 Pages, 25 Duotone Plates, $ 75.00, Published By Nazraeli,

<EVERGLADES>

Book Signing at Paris Photo

November 10th, Thursday : Grand Palais Booth A36 - Galerie Camera Obscura

November 12th, Saturday At 1pm : Grand Palais Booth C18 - Howard Greenberg Gallery

November 13th, Sunday At 5pm : Le Monte-En-L'air Bookstore - 2 Rue De La Mare 75020 Paris

Https://Epaper.Nzz.Ch/Index.Cfm/Epaper/1.0/Share/Email?DefId=6&PublicationDate=2016-10-31&NewspaperName=Neue%20Z%C3%BCrcher%20Zeitung&PageNo=29&ArticleId=201024154&Signature=D4069a79b5a695c3e9e1b79bc9d02b5643f1822a

Silence in the deep of the sea
Truly simple, simply true: Jungjin Lee at the Fotomuseum Winterthur
by Daniele Muscionico

Let it go. Let go of all delusions and conceptions. Of images of what photography is supposed to be, perfect photography. What the wind is. The sea. The desert. Or a simple ceramic bowl. Let go and follow Jungjin Lee, this visual poet who merges two cultures, Seoul, New York, the East and the West – Lee being the interface and the seam. Her images suture the philosophy of things with the philosophy of mind. For the first time, you can now see her works of the past twenty years in a museum environment in Europe – and anyone who encounters her is affected.

Emptiness that is nothing more than form. Form that is nothing more than emptiness. Landscapes, natural details, serial-mounted landscape abstractions. White, black, and countless half-tones in between. Charcoal drawings from the darkroom. Image content and spaces treated in an egalitarian way and manually applied to Korean rice paper: Hovering, airy, comparable to a physical touch, a contact with sculptural calligraphy. All this is “Echo," the alternative visual experience, the metaphysical understanding of the image, a reverberation from the depths of the ocean, where beneath the movement at the surface, the restlessness of life – there is silence.

Jungjin Lee, born in Seoul in 1951 – in her case, references are impertinence. And yet, one has to drop a few names: She is the artist who combined Robert Frank’s techniques of scratched, injured negatives with the minimalist conceptual art of the early Hiroshi Sugimoto. In the US she is highly quoted, there is not a single important museum that does not collect some of her works. Gradually and finally, she is also becoming better known in Europe. Her participation in the monumental Israel project “This Place” has definitely contributed to this success. Launched by the French photographer Frédéric Brenner between 2007 and 2012, it follows the tradition of the Farm Security Administration (1937-1946) under Roosevelt, who had the situation of impoverished agricultural workers documented.

For “This Place”, Lee and eleven other internationally renowned photographers, such as Jeff Wall, Gilles Peress, Fazal Sheikh and Thomas Struth, travelled to Israel and Cisjordan. In the end, the Korean’s position and artistic outcome in New York proved to be at least as strong as that of the most renowned contributors, independent, personal and more than matching her competitors’ works. She later called the installation “Unnamed Road” and, as always after the end of a series, published an artist's book of the same title. Together with many others, this publication forms part of the exhibition, as an artist’s edition and in other versions.

Jungjin Lee exclusively in Winterthur and without exception with works from her personal archives: There is only one lender in this case, and that is the artist herself. Winterthur and the exhibition “Echo” are worth a trip – and more than that. Prerequisite is, however, that the traveller comes provided with time, an open mind and an open heart.

Ultimately, it is quite simple. As simple as the image contents seem. Lee's object-like suspended particles exude a peace and quiet as only views of the open sea or the endless desert do. "Echo" was prepared for years and finalised by Urs Stahel, the museum’s founding director. Now Thomas Seelig can finish the work and present a silent sensation: Jungjin Lee in Winterthur is a highlight in the history of this probably most important photo museum in Europe.

Not only does the house show itself at its most uncompromising best, it has also improved technically – with new LED lighting. For “Echo”, Seelig lets more daylight than usual into the rooms, and so the image bodies seem to vibrate and hover even further away from the walls than possible and strive towards the cold, high bluish grey of the sky. The deserts of “American Deserts” (1990- 1995) are collected by Seelig, the series “Ocean” (1999), “On the Road” (2000-2001), “Wind” (2004- 2007), but also “Things” (2003-2007), her later works, when the artist turned away from nature and towards abstraction.

Especially in “Things”, these everyday objects, to which Lee attests a life of their own, her intentions manifest themselves. She puts her objects into a white void, as if they had made themselves at home there, a cosy home: “The empty space is more important than the photographed, represented object. It's like a dancer on a stage. He cannot move when there is no empty space around him. "Form and emptiness are not opposites; on the contrary, one is the constituent of the other. Only as a unit, only through the presence of both realities, Lee says, one and the other are perceivable in the first place.

Of course, Lee is not the first to propagate emptiness as a form of poetry and life. Artists have always relied on the East Asian tradition, Peter Brook is in the theatre one of its most uncompromising representatives.

Similar to emptiness, Lee also pleads for the imperfect and ephemeral. For this reason, the images collected in the context of “Echo” force the subject matter through a printing process from the 19th century. Hand-crafted rice or mulberry paper - margins torn, fibres visible on the image carrier – Lee paints a light-sensitive emulsion like a painter's act with a broad brush. It is not the artisan who determines each image, in the darkroom every images determines more or less itself how it wants to be seen. The only and reliable constant is the stain, the impurity, and this is what turns the beautiful into the perfectly beautiful. In Japan, Wabi-Sabi is the tradition, according to which only things that show a visible history can be beautiful.

Texture and materiality have the same value as content. The “Ocean” spills itself at the viewer's feet with the specific weight of water. And the "Thing", the ceramic dish, burned in the darkroom, tells of its use and its users. Her Echo is as diverse as collective memory is. Lee's thought-provoking images are their pure resonance.

Fotomuseum Winterthur: Jungjin Lee, “Echo”, until 29 Jan. 2017, Catalogue CHF 46.

JUNGJIN LEE - ECHO Fotomuseum Winterthur

Verschiedene Reisen führen Jungjin Lee Anfang der 1990er Jahren in die endlosen Weiten Amerikas, wo sie Wüsten, Felsen, Gestrüpp und Kakteen in archaischen Urmomenten festhält. Ihre fragmentarisch poetischen Bildserien beschrieb der grosse Robert Frank als "landscapes without the human beast".

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Jungjin Lee - Echo

2016.09.17 - 2017.01.29
Opening - Friday, September 16, 2016, 6 - 9pm. 7pm - Introduction By Thomas Seelig
Artist' Talk In The Exhibition - September 18, 2016, 11:30am

In the early 1990s, Jungjin Lee (*1961 Korea) travelled across the endless expanses of America, where she captured its deserts, rocks, bushes and cactuses in archaic, primal imagery. Starting with this early landscape series, the exhibition Jungjin Lee – Echoat Fotomuseum presents eleven groups of works, a first retrospective showcasing a visual oeuvre that now spans two full decades. The great Robert Frank once described Lee’s fragmentary and poetic images as “landscapes without the human beast”. He was referring to the near-complete absence of people in the work of Jungjin Lee, even though her photographs may portray traces of civilisation or include her own body inserted into the picture.

Alongside her American Desert(1990–1995) series, the artist developed an early tendency to work on the boundaries of different cultures, living and travelling widely in Korea and the United States. With Pagodas(1998) and Thing(2003–2007) she created two important cycles of works in which she liberated objects by means of templates and a soft and precisely calibrated lighting. With a sleight of hand, for instance, the upwardly tapered structures of five story brick-built pagodas are mirrored in their foundations. Through this doubling of volume, the pagoda ‘not only grows in height, but also becomes rooted in the depths’ (see Lena Fritsch in the accompanying publication). Within the exhibition space, the artist adopts the East Asian theory of the harmony of objects, presenting five pagodas next to one another. The world of signs in Thingis also carefully balanced between object and plane, volume and non-volume. Hand-crafted bowls, vessels and furnishings are imaged with a subtle sense of placement. Whether centrally positioned, at the upper or lower edge, or radically cropped, the objects take on an auratically charged life of their own within the large-format space of the picture.

Further groups of works in the same vein include Ocean(1999), On Road (2000–2001) and Wind(2004–2007). The artist manages to create powerful photographic images that exude a transcendental and almost meditative sense of composure. Lee does not aim for topographical or factual attributions when she wanders through a grimy and all but abandoned mining town, when she contrasts the imagined expanses of the oceans in darkly detailed views of water and land, or captures almost imperceptible natural phenomena such as the weather in metaphorical images. With her fundamentally artistic approach, Lee pushes the boundaries of photographic narrative, seeking significance and meaning on the interface between ‘non-place’ and ‘non-moment’.

The artist moved to New York in 1988, where, attracted by the vitality of the art scene, she soon forged her own individual path. This did not lead to conceptual art, as it did for so many of her contemporaries. After living in Seoul from 1997 to 2009, Jungjin Lee returned to New York where she has been residing since 2009. Drawing upon her own East Asian background and experience, Lee has developed a highly idiosyncratic visual syntax, creating a space of poetic resonance through sensitivity and intuition. She mines a profound understanding of materiality, texture and craftsmanship. Working with Liquid Light, she applies diluted light-sensitive emulsions onto hand-made traditional Korean rice paper. Unlike the immaculate finish of prints on industrially produced photographic paper, her hand-developed works show up
the flaws in the uncontrollable natural process. Far from being seen as defective, these finely grained analogue prints with their blemishes and imperfections constitute an intelligent departure from photography’s purported claim to truth. For once, the technical medium seems to be liberated from its own inner logic, offering the viewer a visceral and elemental approach to the image that is rarely found in contemporary photography.

The exhibition is supported by the Volkart Foundation and the Friends’ Association Fotomuseum Winterthur. Additional funding by the Walter Haefner Foundation, Hunziker Betatech AG and the Dr. Georg and Josi Guggenheim Foundation.

An accompanying catalogue will be published by Spector Books, including a short introduction by Thomas Seelig and essays by Lena Fritsch, Hester Keijser and Liz Wells.

ACCOMPANYING PROGRAME

Sunday, 18.09.2016, 11.30 A.M. - Artist Talk In The Exhibition
Saturday, 22.10.2016, 4 P.M. - Béla Bartók (1881–1945): Duos For Two Violins (1931)
Violin: Anzhela Golubyeva Staub & Chie Tanaka
In Cooperation With Musikkollegium Winterthur
Saturday, 10.12.2016, 4 P.M. - Special Guided Tour With Khanh Trinh, Museum Rietberg

Press Material And High Resolution Press Images Can Be Downloaded At Press.Fotomuseum.Ch.
For More Information Please Contact: Melinda Por, Por@Fotomuseum.Ch

Fotomuseum Winterthur
Grüzenstrasse 44+45
CH-8400 Winterthur
+41 (0)52 234 10 60
Info@Fotomuseum.Ch

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ART BASEL

Booth F1, June 16 – 19, 2016

Photomonitor's review of photo london

The opposite of Guitty in its silent stillness, the water’s edge is also the subject of Jungjin Lee’s desolate Wind 07-80 (2007), one of her typically lyrical landscape prints where the feel seems more important than the subject. Water also pervades Nadav Kander’s painterly Untitled IV(2016), a great vertical calm of dark green sea and light green sky pricked by a horizontal sliver of coast. It looks as much like a painting by Whistler as it does a contemporary photograph. By contrast, water only punctures the tranquility of Japanese photographer Takeshi Shikama’s vast Galician treescape, with its inaudible waterfall a tiny but vital detail in an overwhelming forest.

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Nous sommes heureux de vous convier à découvrir (après "Thing + Wind" en 2012 et "Unnamed Road" en 2015), le nouveau travail de Jungjin Lee, réalisé dans le parc national des Everglades, au sud de la Floride,

Jungjin Lee, née en Corée en 1961, a commencè à photographier au début des années 80 durant ses études d'arts (spécialité en céramique) à Séoul. Elle s'installe à New York en 1988 pour suivre des cours de photographie (New York University). Elle y réside depuis lors, se consacrant à ce médium, qu'elle traite d'une façon très plastique, réalisant notamment des tirages sur papiers coréens en fibres de murier sensibilisés au pinceau.

Les lieux photographiés par Jungjin Lee ont une présence étrange. Tels des paysages mentaux, ils semblent naître d'un rêve. Cela tient en partie à la nature de tirages dans lesquels le réalisme photographique se mèle à une matière picturale qui fait songer au dessin.
Ce travail sur la forme est nécessaire pour faire de l'image un espace de méditation, pour donner à voir, sous la surface visible, "le coeur immobile des choses". Jungjin Lee donne à sa photographie une dimension existentielle, celle d'une interrogation sur notre présence au monde.

Dans plusieurs de ses précédentes séries, Jungjin Lee a photographié les espaces désertiques de l'ouest américain.
Les Everglades sont à l’opposé du désert aride. Mais dans cette nature primitive, où l’homme n’a pas facilement sa place, elle a retrouvé la même confrontation avec un lieu essentiel, mélange inextricable des éléments (eau, ciel, terre), pénétré et sillonné par la vie.
"Les Everglades m'ont poussé à voir différemment... D'en haut comme un si j'étais un oiseau, et d'en bas comme si j'étais un serpent".

Galerie Camera Obscura

268, boulevard Raspail 75014 Paris

www.galeriecameraobscura.fr • tél : 01 45 45 67 08

Mardi à vendredi : 12h - 19h / Samedi : 11h - 19h

Please Join us at The Armory Show

Pier 92, 12th Avenue at 55th Street, Booth 118

March 3rd – March 6th 12:00pm – 7:00pm

Featuring works by:

Bill Brandt, Bruce Davidson, Roy DeCarava, William Eggleston, Yumiko Izu, William Klein, Dorothea Lange, Jungjin Lee, Saul Leiter, Alex Majoli, Joel Meyerowitz, Gjon Mili, Sarah Moon, Arnold Newman, Marvin Newman, Helmut Newton, Gordon Parks, Irving Penn, Deborah Turbeville, among others

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I proposed that my project would be based in the deserts and the land that contains layers of history. The land is always changing but there is some very fundamental truths that never change and that is what I wanted to concentrate on.

The communities that have shaped the land are different, from Jerusalem to Bedouin society… The land is different – its climates – but it is the people who live there that make the diversity of the land. But there are landscapes such as the mountains and the hills along the West Bank to Nazareth that are very spiritual. It’s not purely determined by nature, there are always fragments of life and what has been left there, just enough to feel what has gone on there.

What I am searching for in my photographs is something about the life. It’s about the solitary state of being human. Life changes on the surface, like an ocean. You have the constant movement of water on the surface but deep down, at the core, there is no movement.

On the final trip it was more… how can I say? You know the Buddhist term ‘nirvana’? It was as if I had finally let go of my aversions and delusions and could draw on something much more fundamental. It’s like ice becoming water; it was no longer solid, it spread like water. Maybe that isn’t noticeable for anyone else; it’s a very delicate notion.

– Jungjin Lee

Each day, L’Oeil de la Photographie will present to you a series by a photographer.
Biography

EXHIBITION
This place
From February 12 to June 5th, 2016
Brooklyn Museum of Art
200 Eastern Pkwy
Brooklyn, NY 11238
United States
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org
http://www.this-place.org
http://www.jungjinlee.com

Jungjin Lee

Everglades and Unnamed Road

October 29 - December 12, 2015

Opening Reception: Thursday, October 29th, 6:00pm - 8:00pm

The acclaimed Korean artist Jungjin Lee will have her inaugural exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery from October 29 - December 12, 2015. Jungjin Lee: Unnamed Road/Everglades will present photographs from two recent series. Unnamed Road is a body of work on Israel and the West Bank; with Everglades, Lee turns her focus to the Florida Everglades.

Jungjin Lee’s photography is imbued with elemental vastness and wonder. A former assistant of Robert Frank, she creates meditative landscapes with a unique interplay between image and material, capturing moments in time that are uniquely her own. Using a multilayered process that integrates elements of painting, Lee’s photographs exude a materiality not often found in photography. She aims to find “a fundamental essence of things being captured through my intuition, the inner state of my mind, beyond my thinking.”

Lee was one of twelve renowned photographers who traveled to Israel and the West Bank between 2009 and 2013 to create work for This Place, a major traveling exhibition initiated by Frederic Brenner, which will be exhibited at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach from October 15, 2015 – January 17, 2016 and the Brooklyn Museum from February 12 – June 5, 2016.

Of her work in Israel and the West Bank, Lee has said, “What I am searching for in my photographs is something about life. It’s about the solitary state of being human. Life changes on the surface, like an ocean. You have the constant movement of water on the surface, but deep down, at the core there is no movement.”

Last year, Lee was one of five contemporary, photo-based artists commissioned by the Norton Museum of Art to create a body of work on the Florida Everglades. Lee was asked to respond to the physical, ideological, and aesthetic boundaries of the Everglades—one of the most unique, contested, and vital landscapes on the planet. The body of work was exhibited earlier this year at the Norton Museum in Imaging Eden.

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Signed Copies of Unnamed Road Available for Purchase