This exhibition introduces seven new photographic works from Jee Young Lee's Stage of Mind , a project on which the artist has been working continuously since 2007. Jee Young Lee “constructs” scenes for her camera rather than employing the traditional method of “taking” images such as still lifes, figures, or landscapes. Her stage for these fictional scenes is her room-sized studio in Seoul, measuring 360 x 410 x 240 centimetres, where the artist's labor -intensive surrealistic fantasy creations realize her psychological states within the confines of physical space.
Lee's artistic motivation derives from her quest for personal identity. In each of Lee's stories, the artist is the protagonist. At times facing away from us, at other times showing only part of her body or reclining, she quietly and mysteriously inhabits her dream-like realms. Through their bold materials and patterns, dramatic colors, and intriguing narratives, Lee's new works signal maturity, coherence, and sophistication . The legends of East and West, Korean proverbs, personal childhood experiences, and immediate realities provide the motifs for her creations.
Among Lee's new works, I'll Be Back draws upon a Korean fable in which a tiger chases desperate children into a well. A god lowers a rope from the sky by which the children escape, but when the tiger cries out for like succor, a rotten rope is lowered, condemning the tiger to a miserable fate. Lee reinterprets the horror of this inescapable situation to suggest the possibility of survival through her own will, her lone arm reaching for a rope just out of reach while thousands of traditional blue fans conjure up the threatening waters swirling around her.
Broken Heart makes visual the Korean expression “like breaking a stone with an egg” – an ineffectual effort against insurmountable adversity. Last Supper conflates the Christian image of the meal that foreshadows Jesus' impending demise with the competition for limited resources illustrated by hundreds of rats racing toward the table from which the artist appears to be rescuing a plate of cheese. Resurrection , which suggests the hope of rebirth, is inspired by Shimchungchun, a Korean novel from the Chosun dynasty about a young woman who devotes herself to her blind father, and Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais's Ophelia (1852), which depicts Shakespeare's character having drowned herself after going mad from loss of Hamlet's love and the death of her father. Lee identified with the tragic heroine, rising among the water lilies. The otherworldly atmosphere of her piece is enhanced through the use of dry ice.
Contrasting with Lee's legend- and literature-inspired moral messages, Panic Room and Treasure Hunt are based on the artist's childhood memories. Amidst Panic Room 's swirling patterns, objects fly off in all directions in an absurd dizziness, while Treasure Hunt 's grassy Eden – Lee devoted three months to crafting the lush multitude of wire leaves – evokes a child-like wonderland. Monsoon Season , which grows from the artist's personal experience last summer when her studio was flooded, evokes the perils of navigating through thousands of seductive but poisonous sea anemones.
Lee's constructed realities belong to the “directorial mode,” employed since the 1980's by Postmodernist photographers in repudiation of the Modernist practice that sought truth in the everyday world. Lee's “constructed image photography” may be compared to the works of German sculptor and photographer Thomas Demand, who builds life-sized models he intends to demolish after photographing them. Her “staged photography” brings to mind tableaux vivant not unlike U.S. installation artist and photographer Sandy Skoglund's orchestrated room-size installations. But in contrast to these earlier artists, Lee's subjects are deeply personal and intensely psychological. Drawing upon prodigious powers of imagination, she labors for months to create effects that seem to expand and contract physical space. And always, a lone figure inhabits and completes her narratives. Jee Young Lee assumes the roles of set designer, sculptor, performer, installation artist, and photographer – and she executes them all magically.
- Hyewon Yi (Director, Amelie A. Wallace Gallery ,SUNY College at Old Westbury, NY)
