Jin Lee: Landscapes
Chicago Cultural Center
October 6 — December 2, 2001
Exhibition essay

Chicago artist Jin Lee's photographic and digital images present a dialogue of Western and Eastern approaches to landscape representation. Whether utilizing a panoramic format, a sequence of related images, or landscapes that also include the female human presence, Lee’s work seeks to reference and expand upon the traditions of landscape art, from Chinese scroll paintings to the photographs of female figures in nature.

In her panoramic landscapes, Lee conceptualizes landscape not as a fixed place but as an experience that unfolds over time. She uses digital imaging processes to assemble individual images into long horizontal bands that are approximately ten inches high and stretch up to seven feet in length, in the process blurring the distinction between painting and photography, between fact and fiction. Her use of the scroll format, simultaneously reductive and expansive, is influenced by the flat long horizontal line of the midwestern landscape as well as the rhythm of walking. The photographs of stark lines of grasses and tree branches against a flat background represent Lee’s ongoing investigation of order and forms in nature, alluding to the philosophy of natural principle and law in nature in traditional Asian landscape paintings and drawings. The close up portraits of women resting in a natural setting continues Lee’s earlier series of photographs of women sleeping in wide open landscapes. The series suggests intimate subjective experiences of nature that is active and pleasurable.

The landscape has been a primary concern of photographers since the invention of the medium, whether as a record of exploration and settlement of new lands, or as a sublime sight imbued with transcendental otherness. Lee’s interest in the meaning of landscape has evolved since 1996 when she began to t and live part time in more rural central Illinois. Lee's images are records of walking/observing/meditating on the subject of nature, usually as viewed from a low eye level, close to the ground. Lee has written that her project "seeks to expand the camera's eye and to challenge the mind's eye..."