Jiyen Lee’s main interests lie in the process of creating patterns with elements of micro visual recognition. She has been presenting her art practices of transforming the familiar into organic forms and new space-time through her large-scale photocollage series that were created by rearranging snapshot photos of everyday life, and her shredded banknote works. As such, Lee visualizes familiar landscapes and objects by means of recombining them, and through abstract reinterpretation. This process involves revealing beauty that existed all along but were intangible to us such as patterns and rules that are invisible to the naked eye and require a microscope to see. Lee explores the rules that exist on the other side of reality that we see and has sought out and experimented with ways to visualize it. Her works that are sculpted by light is created by visualizing patterns that are etched through the passage of time, and the primitive structures and forms that make up the material world using science and technology.

In this exhibition, Lee presents the Stain-Rainbow Forest series that was created by using technology including nano pattern replication technology[1], 3D printing, and LED control programming to convey her visual language. She illustrates a primeval kind of beauty that cannot be artificially controlled or regulated by people and evokes a novel sensory expansion in the audience. Lee’s sculptures that are shaped from time and light reveal to us, non-tangible and non-material elements that exist on the other side of the visual environment we have grown accustomed to.

[1] Nano pattern replication technology involves replicating nanostructures smaller than one micrometer on the semiconductor wafer.

About the artist

Jiyen Lee (b. 1979) mainly works with photo collage, video, installation, and other diverse media to cultivate her interest in telling a macroscopic story by gathering little things. Lee held solo exhibitions in the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art Project Gallery (2018), Interaction Seoul (2017), MakeShop Art Space Paju (2015), Space K Daegu (2013), and salon de H, Seoul (2011); and presented her work in many places around the world including SOKA Art Center (Beijing), Espace Louis Vuitton (Hong Kong), Saatchi Gallery (London), Le Tripostal Museum (Lille), Ron Mandos Gallery (Amsterdam), Akiyoshidai International Art Village (Yamaguchi). Jiyen Lee began to combine art, science, and technology to further explore the themes of the micro-world since her participation in Artience Daejeon (2020-2021). Recently she showcased Stain-Rainbow Forest (2021) at The Reference, Seoul.