Jungjin Lee

In this series, Lee captures the American southwest and transforms it with liquid light and diluted light-sensitive emulsions to create images that are as uncontrollable and natural as the landscape she depicts. Desert comprises four series of works (each bound as a separate book and presented in a unique slipcase), all of which contain monochromatic images of arid lands. Stratigraphy etched into rock faces, massive stones, cave-like precipices and anthropomorphic fauna showcase an extensive compendium of the desert’s many faces and textures. Each image focuses on the landscape’s formal qualities, eschewing human presence, simultaneously evoking late 19th-century photography, while epitomizing the stark modernity of Lee’s lens. “As a photographer,” writes Lee, “I am primarily concerned with the unconscious, the unknown, and the invisible.”

In the early 1990s, various trips took South Korea–born, New York–based artist Jungjin Lee (born 1961) into the endless expanse of America, where she captured archaic, primal images of deserts, rocks, undergrowth and cacti. Drawing on her South Korean heritage, the artist developed a highly unique pictorial language in series such as Ocean, On Road, Pagodas, Things and Wind, series in which her fundamental interest in nature and culture is expressed in a poetic language of materiality, texture and craftsmanship that takes place in the field and in the darkroom. One of her signature materials is Liquid Light; she applies this photosensitive emulsion onto rice paper with a coarse brush.

Jungjin Lee: Echo presents 11 groups of the photographer's works, explored and contextualized in new essays—providing, for the very first time, an overview of an oeuvre spanning two decades.