Echo

Opening November 4 at 6 pm

The voice of Jungjin Lee (1961) distinguishes itself in contemporary photography. From her first works dating back nearly 30 years to her most recent series, her oeuvre strikes one with its beauty and pictorial quality. Nourished by both Asian (the artist was born in South Korea) and Occidental (she has been living in the United States for many years) cultures, she develops her photographs in an artisanal manner on large rice paper, on which she applies the photo emulsion with a brush. Materiality and texture occupy an important place for this artist, who studied ceramics. She directs her camera toward the landscape, notably marked by the American desert – vast and rocky. She also turns her attention on some everyday objects or on Buddhist temples that become pretexts for her to try her hand at abstraction and to experiment with new forms. Her photographic research, which she develops as much in artist’s books as in large format prints, examine the narrative power of images. Jungjin Lee creates images that are poetic, disturbing, and bewitching and which incite our introspection. They are an “echo” of her inner being. Like the photographer Robert Frank, for whom she had been an assistant, Lee is thoroughly convinced that an image acts like a poem that we wish to read again and again.

The exhibition is made in collaboration with the Fotomuseum Winterthur, and curated by its director, Thomas Seelig.