To support emerging artists, OCI Museum holds the exhibition series of 'OCI Young Creatives' program. As the first exhibition, Ji Young Lee and Hyun Ho Lee will show the art works. 

The room of the mind or the stage of the inner world built by Lee Jee-young turns into staged photography with the involvement of painting, sculpture and installation and the presence of a model. Blurring the boundaries of mediums that modernists had stuck to, such a complex and multilayered practice is a paragon of mixed media and hybridization that postmodernists have a liking for, and yet it’s no longer considered to be new. The approach of Lee Jee-young is quite reminiscent of that of Sandy Skoglund (born in 1946), who is now one of the world master photographers of our time.

However, comparing to Skoglund's work, the sets of Lee Jee-young were built in her studio and thereby weren’t able to move to exhibit. Moreover, the objects Lee made are of Styrofoam or corrugated board, so they are more like peripherals, not possessing independent significances, and ephemeral, causing them to be unable to be sold as individual pieces. Most importantly, the big difference lies in that the staged photography by Lee Jee-young is autobiographical by and large whereas Skoglund excludes any sort of personal narratives. Therefore, the staged set of Lee Jee-young is “her stage of mind.”

My Chemical Romance, one of Lee’s recent works clearly demonstrates the similarities and differences between the two. The pattern of caution and warning with black diagonal lines against yellow is repeated, obsessive-compulsively, over the floor, walls and pipe lines; and the extreme density of the pipes and steam rising from where pipes break indicates the set of a huge machine room and yet it evokes a scene from a sci-fi or an action movie Bruce Willis might have starred in. Amid such chaos, however, a woman in black is not in haste. She gestures to straighten out the situation but seems deprived of the will or the physical power to do so. And there is a big black dog slowly walking out of the set to the bottom left, indifferently or helplessly.

However, through the work title, My Chemical Romance, Lee Jee-young manifests that the disengagement of communication and the stage of chaos is from within her. The approach is unlike Skoglund’s which represents the absence of communication and apocalyptic isolation that all our contemporaries including the artist suffer; instead, Lee Jee-young clarifies that it is more about “her” chemical romance. The work is the reenactment, through the implication of chemistry, of the ending of “her romance,” and indifference and lethargy resulted from such failure. The chemicals used to stage the drama of “her romance” that tumbled down are glycol-based fluids which are evaporative as steam and marked by yellow and black paint and plastic pipes.

Lee Jee-young’s staged photography is evidently the result of negative perceptions on living conditions of artists. Skepticism and lacking gives off amid the use of obsessive color and repetitive patterns; anxiety about future and a sense of despair toward art comes out impliedly in this psychedelic reality. Nonetheless, the artworks describing the lives of artists fatigued with struggles in art will be marked as some of Lee Jee-young’s best.

During a process of work, Lee Jee-young spends two or three months making objects, installing the set and test-shooting with her digital camera. She then confirms all the necessary conditions for the final shoot while planning the positions of models. Finally, adjusting the positions and postures of models, she finalizes her staged photographs in 4 by 5 negatives.
- Choi Bong-Lim (Photography Cricit, Artist)

*image (left)
My Chemical Romance, 2013
Inkjet print, 190x144cm
© Jee-Young Lee

Courtesy of OCI Museum