Jungjin Lee: Everglades and Opening

Exhibition on view: May 5-June 17, 2017

Opening reception: Friday, May 5, 5-8pm

While I am not regularly drawn to landscape photographs there are several notable exceptions. Jungjin Lee’s work is one of them. 

For a landscape photograph to work it has to have an elemental simplicity and balance, a beautifully nuanced tonality and a spirit, inner light or magical presence.  Jungjin Lee’s works presents these elements in a uniquely identifiable way:  at once beautifully conceived and executed, powerful yet understated, meditative and generally serene.  They are consistently important works of art.

In this exhibition Lee presents her new vertical landscapes and her more classic horizontal landscapes together for the first time as inkjet prints.  

Her earlier work utilized a liquid photosensitive emulsion brushed on handmade Korean mulberry or Japanese rice paper. The texture of the paper, its irregular edges and the gestural marks of the brushstroke as well as the noticeable grain and muted tonality of the silver in the emulsion create unique, deeply resonant painterly images.   

This recent work is also remarkable. The pigmented inks printed on artist papers yield beautiful more even, crisp and graphic art works. The vertical landscapes are at once compressed and contained creating a more intimate focus and feeling of being let in on or discovering something special.          

Andrew Bae Gallery is to be commended for presenting this extraordinary body of mature photographic art. 

-Stephen Daiter