THINGS
May 29 - July 3, 2004
Bellas Artes is pleased to announce its second exhibition for the Korean photographer, Jungjin Lee. Born in Korea in 1961, Lee mastered calligraphy as a child and studied ceramics at Hong - Ik University in Seoul. She lived in New York City from 1988 - 1996 where she absorbed the contemporary art scene and received a master's degree in photography from New York University. During her years as a graduate student, she worked as an assistant for photographer/filmmaker Robert Frank.
Lee's black and white photography has a painterly quality since her prints are not mechanically reproduced multiples, but instead bear the mark of the hand. The artist brushes liquid emulsion onto the surface of massive sheets of handmade rice paper. The texture of the paper and the gestural marks of the brush stroke create a unique, painterly effect.
Lee's exhibition at Bellas Artes will feature her latest series, THINGS. The things are various objects, but the objects only serve as symbolic abstractions to express her feelings. The things float on the white rice paper in order to make the objects separate from reality.
The following critical remarks were published after Lee's last exhibition at Bellas Artes:
Photography has always looked to other arts for ways to bend and stretch its potential. Jungjin Lee refreshes camera work by alluding to ancient disciplines of clay and ink. I have rarely seen pictures that contradict contemporary photographic practice as forcibly as these images do. Made now, they seem always to have existed. Arriving from deep time, they feel immediate. Like a simple Korean tea bowl, their rough insouciance invites touch.
— Eugenia Parry, THE Magazine, June 2002
Since her last exhibition at Bellas Artes two years ago, Jungjin Lee has participated in three important museum exhibitions: "Idea Photographic: After Modernism" at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, "Crossings 2003: Korea/Hawaii" at The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu and "Leaning Forward, Looking Back: Eight Contemporary Artists from Korea" at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.
Lee's work has been exhibited extensively in galleries and museums in the United States, Europe, and Korea. In the United States, her work has been collected by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe.
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Born 1961, Taegu, Korea
Education:
1991 MA, New York University, Major in Photography, New York
1984 BFA, Hong-lk University, Major in Ceramics, Seoul, Korea
Solo Exhibitions:
2002 Bellas Artes, Santa Fe
2001 Sepia International Inc., New York
2000 Kumho Museum of Fine Art, Seoul
1999 PaceWildensteinMacGill Gallery – Pagodas, Los Angeles
1997 PaceWildensteinMacGill Gallery, Los Angeles
1997 Art Space Seoul Gallery – Wasteland, Seoul
1996 Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies Gallery – Dissolving Landscapes, Wesleyan University, Connecticut
1995 PaceMacGill Gallery – Self Portrait, New York
1995 Fuel Gallery – American Scenes, Seattle, Washington
1994 Sonia Zannettacci Galerie, Geneva, Switzerland
1993 Photo¹s Gallery, San Francisco, California
1992 Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, Oregon
1991 Past Rays Gallery – Looking, Yokohama, Japan
1990 Gensler Architects, San Francisco, California
1989 Camera Club of New York – A Lonely Cabin in a Far Away Island, New York
1988 Paik-Song Gallery – A Lonely Cabin in a Far Away Island, Seoul
1984 French Cultural Center Europe, Seoul
Group Exhibitions:
2001 Hong Kong Art Center – Current in Korean Contemporary Art, Hong Kong
2001 Tai Pei Fine Art Museum – Current in Korean Contemporary Art, Tai Pei
2000 Korean Culture Center – Figures and Paysages, Paris
2000 Odense Foto Triennale – Slowness, Odense, Denmark
2000 Rena Brenstein Gallery – Paper Cuts, San Francisco
2000 Arles Photography Festival – Exchange and Interchange, Arles, France
2000 Hanlim Museum – The Sun Rises in the East, Taejon
2000 FotoFest International Korean Photography, Houston, Texas
2000 National Museum of Contemporary Art New Collection, Kwachon
1999 FNAC Collections, Paris
1998 National Museum of Contemporary Art – The Visual Exhibition of Photographic Image, Seoul
1998 Seoul Art Center History of Korean Photography, Seoul
1998 The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm – Asiatiska Fotografer, Sweden
1998 Hanlim Museum – Body & Photography, Taejon
1997 Gallery Artbeam – Monochrome, Seoul
1996 Walkerhill Art Center, Seoul
1996 Whitney Museum of American Art – Perpetual Mirage: Photographic Narratives of the Desert West, New York
1995 Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art – Photography, Today, Kyongiu
1995 The Center for Photography at Woodstock – Passing Moments, Memory Trace & Light Images, Woodstock, New York
1994 L.A. County Museum – New Work from the Collections, Los Angeles
1994 Seoul Art Center – 1945-1990, Historical Prospect, Seoul
1993 Korean Cultural Center – Bridging the Differences, Los Angeles
1993 Zabriskie Gallery, New York
1992 Turner Krull Gallery, Los Angeles
1992 Zelda Cheatle Gallery, London
1986 Battangol Gallery, Seoul
1986 Dongsung-dong Art Museum, Seoul
1985 Paris Museum of Modern Art, Paris
Selected Collections:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
L.A. County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
Houston Museum of Fine Art, Texas
New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans
Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe
FNAC, Paris
Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art, Kyongiu, Korea
National Museum of Contemporary Art, Kwachon, Korea
Hanlim Museum, Taejon, Korea
Kumho Museum of Fine Art, Seoul
Publications:
2001 Jungjin Lee 99-01 On Road/Ocean, Kukje Gallery/Sepia International
2000 Jungjin Lee: Beyond Photography, Shigak Publications, Seoul
1997 Wasteland, Art Space Seoul, Seoul
1996 Dissolving Landscapes, Wesleyan University, Connecticut
1993 The American Desert, Shigak Publications, Seoul
1988 A Lonely Cabin in a Far Away Island, Yelwha-dang Art Publication, Seoul
