‘‘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.
