Trish Clark Gallery is delighted to announce Omnipresent, an exhibition premiering work developed during Jae Hoon Lee’s 2014 residency in New York. Awarded the 2013 Wallace Awards Paramount Prize, Lee was granted a six-month residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York. Undertaken in the same year was a three-month residency at the Cemeti Art House in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
Lee’s physical and conceptual migrations continue to define his photographic language. A self-proclaimed cultural wanderer, his enduring fascination with place, movement, individuality and skin recurs in skewed, manipulated and hyper-real compositions. Often stitching multiple photographs together in the same work, Lee classes this practice as ‘time-based’ as the resultant image does not capture one moment, but rather, folds many moments into the same field. Presented at a monumental scale, these works bring the viewer closer the overwhelming sensation of experiencing geological forms, and blur the boundary between photography and installation.
These deceptive works revel in mystery, slowly inviting an acute engagement with texture of land, liquid, atmosphere and perception. But this experience is double edged: the logic of one micro-moment dissolves under the context of the whole, and the complexity of his ‘doctored evidence’ moves toward otherworldly surrealism.
Within Omnipresent, mural-scale images exemplary of these manipulations are presented alongside works that undergo a marked departure from the artist’s oeuvre to date. Where intricate technological finesse and vibrant colour were hallmarks of previous series, Lee’s New York body of work also explores possibilities of technological corruption and reproduction. Glitches and streaks riddle digitized images to oneiric effect – a chimeric recollection of captured volcanoes, clouds and moons.
Raised in Seoul, Lee migrated to the United States in 1993, studying at the San Francisco Art Institute. Relocating to New Zealand in 1998, he studied at the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts, graduating with an MFA in 2003 and a Doctorate of Fine Art in 2012. Over fifteen years Lee has exhibited widely across New Zealand, Australia, Korea, China, Singapore, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States. His works have been broadly acquired by public institutions and are held in many private collections. Lee has also received the Antarctica New Zealand Arts Fellowship, in 2011.
