Juyon Lee

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

I seek to materialize the human relationship to time, exploring how the ephemeral and ontological residues, such as memory and the subconscious, converge in human experience and perception. With attention to dissonance experienced in space and time, I construct material compositions of light, diaphanous mediums like glass, and architecture, where participants can perceive the presence of change in the medium of time. Along with sculptural application of images, intangible elements embody the fluid interplay between image, medium, and spatiotemporal perception of reality. I view my process akin to lens-making, with a focus on perception. The human body is a porous lens, through which perception is always incomplete and contingent. This approach invites reflections on interconnectivity between all things, where contextualization operates within liquidity and relation rather than fixed isolation. In recent work, I hand-weave and sculpt photographs into glass and other translucent materials, destabilizing their indexicality and turning them into mutable entities. These image-based installations become sites of passage rather than fixed representations; image becomes shadow, a moving reflection to be ruminated on one's own sense of being and becoming. Embodying experiences ranging from familial grief to nonlinearity of time, my work explores this existential instability through the material, the immaterial, and image, the ghost in between.

Artwork