Jungjin Lee

Jungjin Lee (born 1961) is a South Korean photographer and artist who currently lives and works in New York City.

Early life and education Lee was born in South Korea in 1961.

Photographic process Lee uses a medium format panoramic camera. She prints on traditional Korean paper which she hand sensitizes with a brush using Liquid Light. This print is then scanned and Lee further manipulates the image in Photoshop. The resulting image is a high contrast black and white print, in which the indexical brush marks are still visible. Lee effaces the technological capability of her digital camera to communicate her emotional state of mind at the time she takes the photograph to the viewer. This process also results in an image that recalls traditional Asian ink painting.

Photo scholar and critic Eugenia Parry explores Lee's series through the lens of Buddhist spirituality in the essay that accompanies Lee's photobook Wind. Parry observes that in Lee's photographs she contrasts discarded props of human life with the land, symbolically acting as her on Buddhist teacher, asking viewers to "view ordinary things, love change, tolerate absolute incomprehensibility. Contemplate the temporal, recognize the celestial".

Photo critic and historian Vicki Goldberg observes that Lee's landscapes represent her own, "introspective states and thoughts." While the majority of Lee's work focuses on the land; in several series she explores other subjects including Pagodas (1998); crumbling Buddhist sculptures, Buddhas (2002); everyday objects, Thing (2003–06) and portraits, Breath (2009–).

Publications

A Lonely Cabin In A Far Away Island, The Camera Club of New York, New York City, 1989 Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, OR, USA, 1992 Self Portrait, PaceMacGill Gallery, New York City, 1995 Buddha, Museum of Photography, Seoul, Korea, 2002 Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, OR, USA, 2003 Road To The Wind, Goeun Museum Of Photography, Busan, Korea, 2008 Wind By Jungjinlee, Aperture Gallery, New York City, 2011 Thing, Andrea Robbi Museum, St.Moritz, Switzerland, 2013 Echo, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland, 2016; , Wolfsburg, Germany, 2017; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, South Korea, March–July 2018 A retrospective. "Jungjin Lee: Unseen", Huxley-Parlour, London, England, 2025

Collections Lee's work is held in the following public collections: Metropolitan Museum of Art: 9 prints (as of 27 December 2021) Whitney Museum of American Art: 1 print (as of 27 December 2021) Museum of Photography, Seoul