In approaching to Jimin Lee's work, viewers focus on how they take the things emerging from her work.
In her works especially the ones after Bathtub (1995), while we can see the sign in her earlier works, she has started drawing everyday-life mundane objects such as appliances and utensils. For the objects to exist and the objects supposed to exist, she applies various techniques including Photo-etching as her pivotal one, and the images, consequently, obtain certain atmosphere that any of us can sympathize but is lurking behind the work deeply.
"It is metaphor" she said. The lurking atmosphere leads us, the viewers, to receive the sense of human life - of us and Jimin's - emerging from the image.
After graduated Seoul National University, she studied in the Printmaking Research Laboratory of Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music as a scholarship fellow of Japanese Government, and San Francisco Art Institute. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and teaches print-media classes at University of California, Santa Cruz as an assistant professor.
I expect very much for her first solo-exhibition in Japan.
Tadayoshi Nakabayashi
Professor Emeritus, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music