The ordinary objects in Jungjin Lee’s “Thing” photographs–a coat, a chair, a clam–hover mysteriously in space, stripped of their backgrounds. Their solitary forms, which seem fused with the handmade rice paper she prints on, radiate quietude.
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Lee was born in South Korea, where she still lives, and attended a Seoul art school that didn’t offer photography courses. The students organized a photography club and took weekend shooting trips to the suburbs and countryside. The youngest of five children in a “very traditional, very restrictive” family, Lee had never traveled on her own before but soon was making shooting trips alone. She was drawn to nature, country landscapes, houses that looked vacant. “I still like to photograph things that feel empty, like a wall or the corner of a building,” she says. “I’m very private. I prefer to be alone. My soul is more to the shadow side.”
Lee saw her style at the time as overly composed, and she says that meeting Robert Frank, whose photographs she admired, helped her change it. She’d begun printing on rice paper that she hand coated with emulsion. “The paper absorbs the emulsion very deeply,” she says, “so it sometimes looks as if the image is coming from the bottom of the paper.” This accounts for the almost dematerialized presence of some of her subjects.
Where: Andrew Bae, 300 W. Superior
