Jungjin Lee - Photographs London Friday, May 19, 2023 | Phillips
  • ‘‘It's more like feeling the image than seeing it. The texture, the black and white and the light and shade are all parts of my body and yours too.’’
    —Jungjin Lee

    This oversized, panoramic work is an exceptional example of Korean artist Jungjin Lee’s (b.1961) unique image-making process of hand coating hanji [Korean mulberry paper] with photographic emulsion. Unlike her later works, which are reprinted digitally, the Wind series from 2004-7 marks a 15-year culmination of her physically demanding method of creating large, handmade analogue prints, resulting in poetic nuances in texture and tonality. ‘I had to spend many days and nights printing a photo on hanji and I was not able to control the quality consistently,’ explains the artist. ‘It was impossible to produce editions of my works with the same original film because the manual printing resulted in slightly different photographs each time.’  

     

    Taken in the desert in New Mexico, Wind 04-54 reveals the wreckage of a school bus in the centre of a vast landscape with one other vehicle in the far-left distance. Rendered in nuanced monochrome, this work epitomises ‘a continuity of solitariness’ that Lee finds in the places she photographs. Lee has exhibited widely, notably a major retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea in 2018 and her work resides in many prominent collections, including The Met and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

    • Exhibited

      Road to the Wind, Goeun Museum of Photography, Busan, 4 October - 29 November 2008, another

    • Literature

      J. Lee, Wind, New York: Aperture, 2009, pp. 14-15

ULTIMATE

20

Wind 04-54

2004
Gelatin silver emulsion on Korean mulberry paper.
Sheet: 105 x 210 cm (41 3/8 x 82 5/8 in.)
Frame: 112 x 217 cm (44 1/8 x 85 3/8 in.)

Signed, titled, dated and numbered 3/3 in pencil on the verso.

This work is number 3 from the sold-out edition of 3 + 1 AP. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea and the Goeun Museum of Photography, Busan each holds another print of this image.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
£25,000 - 35,000 

Sold for £27,940

Contact Specialist

Rachel Peart
Head of Department, London
RPeart@phillips.com

Yuka Yamaji
Head of Photographs, Europe
YYamaji@phillips.com

General Enquiries
+44 20 7318 4092

Photographs

London Auction 19 May 2023