Jimin Lee

Jimin Lee is the head of the print media program and the director of the Contemporary Print Media research Center.

Her work explores themes of mobility, displacement and labor on the personal and social level as seen in traffic, places of transport, or objects that move or are "in transit" -- travel in both the daily and in the migratory sense. In recent years she has investigated and developed new options and possibilities in print media by adopting emerging print strategies in an expanded art context.  For example, by integrating the traditional woodcut with laser-cutting and inkjet printing processes, she created a new artistic formula of her own that blends conventional mediums of print and contemporary digital technology so that they interplay with and reshape each other. Everyday realities captured in Lee's photographic images become ambiguous and even confusing to the viewer because of the digital manipulations she imposes on them.  This manipulation becomes the means by which she tells her stories and inspires the reading of her digitally-reconstructed pictures as realistic, even though they are fictional.  Realized through Lee's pioneering methods of multiple laser-cut woodblock printing and other photomechanical processes, images acquire rich textural surfaces that bring sharply to the audience’s attention, inviting sustained engagement.

Lee has shown her work internationally in solo exhibitions that have included, among others, Anchor Graphics in Chicago; QCC Art Gallery at the City University of New York; Don Soker Contemporary Art in San Francisco; Hanmi Gallery in Seoul, Korea; Shirota Gallery in Tokyo, Japan; AndrewShire Gallery in Los Angeles; Megalo Gallery in Canberra, Australia; Open Studio Gallery in Toronto, Galerie Alain Piroir in Montreal and Artist Proof Gallery in Calgary, Canada; Guanlan Original Printmaking Base in Shenzhen and Chengdu Art Museum in Chengdu, China; Seven Star Gallery in Berlin, Germany.