About the Exhibition

Capturing Moments – exhibition essay by Sheri Nault

“As for writing, most people secretly believe they themselves have a book in them, which they would write if they could only find the time.” Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead

Jimin Lee creates and communicates stories, through her prints, of experiences which focus on the physical point of a body and the ways in which that body relates to the space around it. The incredible familiarity of the imagery she utilizes creates a sense of deja-vu, allowing the viewer to see both a particular moment that Lee herself must have experienced and, simultaneously, one which they themselves may have had. Through this familiarity, repetition, and open narration Lee transforms brief captured moments into disarmingly familiar narratives about both the artist, and her viewers.

In the past, Lee has often been recognized for her work dealing with mundane and everyday objects; objects which have a relationship to her body through repetitive acts of touch, indicative of and referential to lived personal experiences. Capturing Moments: Tracing the Journey is the third solo exhibition of Lee’s more recent series, in which she has shifted from the physical relationship of the body to objects and, instead, considers the position of the body as a focal point within the experience of movement, migration, and environment.

Through unique and labour-intensive processes, Lee creates images in which her familiar perspective is the centre of a nostalgic universe. She describes the view from within the containers that hold our bodies, that we look out from within, and experience the world through.

Contemporary experience is highly mobile, it is physically and digitally globalized, and many day to day activities lack an immediate physical reality, they are digital, cyber, unreal –  there is no scent or smell or sensation of being within them. In contrast to this, Lee, through travelling, began to focus on her experience of the tactile physicality of being in those places. These recent works consider travel, literally, through mobility and migration but also metaphorically, as an experience that moves the individual.

 What is particularly striking about her work is the incredible accessibility of the images she creates. The road, traffic, vehicles interlocked in gradual movement, or the view out the window of a plane are experiences, tied to daily life, that almost anyone can relate to. This open quality of her work invites viewers to insert their own stories and narratives into the visual spaces she has created – a potential amplified through manipulations of each image.

Though the content of Lee’s prints may appear to be as immediate as a photo on instagram, the process of producing these eerily familiar images includes many steps and translations. Each print may consist of one image or many, combined through digital processes, manipulated to create a singular narrative moment. Further, whether edited minimally or laboriously, the image must then be adapted to become viable for printmaking. Finally, the seemingly immediate moment is transformed through the physically laborious process of producing the prints themselves. The effectiveness of Lee’s subtle manipulations is the deception, translation, and narration embedded within each of her familiar, nostalgic images.

Producing prints is a process that Lee relates to travel itself, the outcome always uncertain.

About the Artist

Jimin Lee is a Korean-born, California-based artist. Lee has had solo exhibitions at Anchor Graphics in Chicago; QCC Art Gallery at the City University of New York; Don Soker Contemporary Art in San Francisco; DoART Gallery/Hyundai Gallery in Seoul, Korea; Shirota Gallery in Tokyo, Japan; An­ drewShire Gallery in Los Angeles; Megalo Gallery in Canberra, Australia; Open Studio Gallery in Toronto, Canada; and Guan­ Ian Original Printmaking Base in Shenzhen, China. Notable group exhibitions include Crosscurrents: 8 American Contempo­ rary Printmakers at II Quadrato di Omega, Rome, Italy; Tradition & Innovation II at Museum Zallerein Halle 6, Essen, Germany; and Graphica Creative 2009 at Jyvaskyla Art Museum, Jyvas­ kyla, Finland.

Since 1995 Lee has been living in the San Francisco Bay Area and she is a professor of art and heads the print media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA.