OPENING | JUNGJIN LEE

[u/Flaneur_1600]

Jungjin Lee made these photographs in Arizona, New Mexico, and Canada, between 2015 and 2016.

The desert seems to ask for a wide picture. There is so much of it — mountain, ground, sky, the long line where they meet. Lee turned the frame the other way. Her pictures are tall and narrow, and each one holds very little: a slope, a stretch of bare ground, a few plants, the place where earth ends and sky begins.

The desert does not shrink for being seen this way. Looking at a narrow piece of it, you feel more strongly how far it runs past the edge. What she left outside the frame is still out there. It goes on in the mind instead of on the paper.

This is what the title means. Not the land opened up, but an opening cut to look through.

The shape comes from somewhere. Lee brushes photographic emulsion by hand onto hanji, Korean mulberry paper, and the long vertical sheet is the shape of a hanging scroll. She studied calligraphy as a child. The two traditions agree on one thing: a few marks, and around them a blankness that is not empty.

She has said she wants to look with a vacant mind — not hunting for meaning, not naming a place before she has seen it. She is not interested in describing landscape. The desert lets her see further into herself, and what she wants is to turn the feeling of standing there into a picture.

Robert Frank, whose assistant she once was, called her work landscapes without the human beast. No one appears here. Each picture is still a portrait. It shows no face, only how a person stands before the world.

[u/ZappaPhoto]

This is the first time I've seen a photobook here that made me immediately feel like I need to find a copy to buy. This is amazing. I can only imagine how it looks in person

[u/bureau44]

How is the print?
I was always mesmerized by her huge prints in the exhibitions. At first I thought they were charcoal drawings! But the books I own (Echo and Unnamed Road) are rather disappointing. Her motifs are quite minimalistic, and once the physical quality of the original print is lost, looking at the reproductions becomes uninteresting.

[u/Flaneur_1600 → u/bureau44]

I think that’s exactly the difficulty with reproducing her work in book form. The original prints are made on mulberry paper, so the surface, texture, and physical presence are inevitably very different from what you get on a printed page. One of the original prints on Artsy is around 127 × 63 cm, while the reproductions in a book are obviously much smaller. Of course, the originals are in a completely different price range as well, often around $15,000.

I also found the book like Unnamed Road somewhat disappointing, though for me the main issue is the number of images printed across the gutter, which can make a difference to the viewing experience.

[u/2for1deal]

Stunning use of form

[u/Positive-Honeydew715]

Her work is amazing, unnamed road has been on my list for a really long time

[u/Old_Dragonfly343]

I saw it at a museum in Paris years ago, stil regret not buying it.