NEW YORK, NY.- The acclaimed Korean artist Jungjin Lee is having her inaugural exhibition at
Howard Greenberg Gallery from October 29 - December 12, 2015. Jungjin Lee: Unnamed Road/Everglades presents photographs from two recent series. Unnamed Road is a body of work on Israel and the West Bank; with Everglades, Lee turns her focus to the Florida Everglades.
Jungjin Lees photography is imbued with elemental vastness and wonder. A former assistant of Robert Frank, she creates meditative landscapes with a unique interplay between image and material, capturing moments in time that are uniquely her own. Using a multilayered process that integrates elements of painting, Lees photographs exude a materiality not often found in photography. She aims to find a fundamental essence of things being captured through my intuition, the inner state of my mind, beyond my thinking.
Lee was one of twelve renowned photographers who traveled to Israel and the West Bank between 2009 and 2013 to create work for This Place, a major traveling exhibition initiated by Frederic Brenner, which is being exhibited at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach from October 15, 2015 January 17, 2016 and the Brooklyn Museum from February 12 June 5, 2016.
Of her work in Israel and the West Bank, Lee has said, What I am searching for in my photographs is something about life. Its about the solitary state of being human. Life changes on the surface, like an ocean. You have the constant movement of water on the surface, but deep down, at the core there is no movement.
Last year, Lee was one of five contemporary, photo-based artists commissioned by the Norton Museum of Art to create a body of work on the Florida Everglades. Lee was asked to respond to the physical, ideological, and aesthetic boundaries of the Evergladesone of the most unique, contested, and vital landscapes on the planet. The body of work was exhibited earlier this year at the Norton Museum in Imaging Eden.
Jungjin Lee (b. 1961) has exhibited her work widely in the United States, Europe, and Korea. Born in Korea, Lee began photographing in the early 1980s while studying ceramics at Hongik University in Seoul. She later earned an M.F.A. in Photography from New York University, and was an assistant to Robert Frank. She has published nine monographs including Unnamed Road (2015), Wind (2009), Jungjin Lee (2006), Thing (2005), Desert (2002), On Road/Ocean (2001), Jungjin Lee: Beyond Photography (2000), Wasteland (1997), and Lonely Cabin in a Far Away Island (1988). Her photographs are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Houston Museum of Fine Art; the Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art, Kyongju, Korea, and other prestigious institutions worldwide. Next year, she will be honored with an early career retrospective by the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Zurich. Lee lives and works in New York City.