Recently graduated from Seoul’s Hongik University in her native South Korea, JeeYoung Lee shoots the invisible. Whereas traditional photography submits extracts of reality to our eyes, the artist 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, she 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 materialised, these worlds turn real and concretise : imagination reverts to the tangible and the photo imagery of such fiction testify as to their reality. In the midst of each of these sets stands the artist : those self-portraits however are never frontal, since it is never her visual aspect she shows, but rather her quest for an identity, her desires and her frame of mind. Her imaginary is a catharsis which allows her to accept social repression and frustrations. The moment required to set the stage gives her time 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 the most promising up-and-rising figureheads of the younger Korean artistic world. Her Photographs have already found their way into public collections such as th Kyoto Photographic Museum in Japan, the Incheon Foundation for Art and Culture, or even Seoul’s OCI Museum.
You can find her work at the OPIOM Gallery in Opio France from Feb. 7 to March 7, 2014.
For more photos by Jee Young Lee, Visit the opiomgallery.com
Treasure Hunt
Resurrection
My Chemical Romance
Last Supper
Birthday
Childhood
Panic Room
The Little Match Girl
Broken Heart
I’ll Be Back
Food Chain
Maiden Voyage
Flu
Nightmare
Black Birds
