Jungjin Lee Explores Her Own Mind Through Landscapes
Unnamed Road, Jungjin Lee. 2010-12
For Jungjin Lee, photographing the landscape is an exploration of her own mind - the introspective states of the artist, whose photographic gaze is insistent and transformative. Her black and white images are self-contained worlds of stillness and wonder, as Lee searches for something constant in the life of the landscape.
Her images suggest that despite the semblance of fluctuation, some fundamental truths do not alter: just as the surface of the ocean is constantly in flux, its depths in fact remain unchanged and enduring. Lee, who describes her photographic state as ‘meditative’, regards the act of photography as emotional and experimental, a moment when ‘that absolute echo within myself travels through time and space’. Yet she struggled to find neutrality in a charged territory that she describes as ‘uncomfortable’.
Lee’s work is often concerned with the materiality of printing technique, and for twenty years she has utilised a liquid photo-sensitive emulsion brushed on handmade rice paper, a method akin to painting. In Unnamed Road, for the first time digital processes were employed; and yet the images explorations of chance and imperfection, drawing the viewer into a realm where fulness of vision is the subject matter.
The way she describes her approach to creating is equivalent to Somatic Landscape Photography. This is a style of photography that captures the relationship between the body and the environment. Her method of making enters a trance like state, from the creation of the work on location connecting to her meditatively to the printing technique being carefully curated. Her work looks like several paintings curated into a single space which is as much a compliment as any because they don’t look of the natural world. Whether this was her intention or not her approach to photography and narrative commands that sort of response from me. I want to explore with graininess and underexposure more, with only a few details of the scene visible, with the scene looking like it has been put together with a paintbrush rather than with light.
