Jae Hoon Lee

INFO

Name	Jae Hoon Lee (he/him)
Born	1973
Country of Birth	South Korea
Place of Residence	Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
Ethnicities	Korean
Dealer Gallery	Robert Heald Gallery
Artform	Visual arts
Decades Active	2000s, 2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Jae Hoon Lee is a contemporary artist who describes his photographic and video artworks as “time-based” for the way they stitch together multiple images and moments within a single work. He has exhibited widely both in Aotearoa and internationally from the early 2000s onwards.

Lee was born in Seoul, moving to the United States at the age of 19 to study at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1998, he moved to Aotearoa and studied at Elam School of Fine Arts, graduating with an MFA in 2003 and a Doctorate of Fine Art in 2012. Having lived in Aotearoa, the United States and Korea, Lee describes himself as a “cultural wanderer” and many of his works display a sense of wonder at the striking landscapes and natural phenomena encountered in his travels. Lee has said:

I believe I am leading a nomadic existence through relocating myself between different cultural territories. In order to assemble an image bank that refers to my experience as a cultural wanderer, I have mainly been collecting source materials in New Zealand, Korea and other countries I have recently visited.

The hallmarks of his works are crisp, clear images (which has been described as a “hyper-real” aesthetic), digital manipulation executed with technical precision, and an often “monumental scale” that brings “the viewer closer [to] the overwhelming sensation of experiencing geological forms, and blur the boundary between photography and installation.” Virginia Were, writing in 2007, said:

The fact he now belongs to two different cultures, whose philosophies and ways of seeing have the potential to collide and ricochet off one another, underpins his practice on a formal and conceptual level, further adding to the element of surprise and discovery that makes his work so compelling, not to mention sensuous, to look at and listen too. For Lee, both sound and images are important and the two are often combined in his installations.

Geographical formations and excerpts from the natural world — light-tinted clouds, veined and speckled leaves, thick blankets of snow — feature in Lee’s work. The manipulation of these images encourages the viewer to appreciate the formal qualities of the natural world, such as cool shadows on crisp white snow, and the texture of ancient rock formations. The looming presence of technology runs through Lee’s work, with works exploring the cloning and glitches that can emerge in the use of editing software, and others that use flatbed scanners to record the changing details of his own body.

Lee has also embraced the portable nature of these image-capture technologies. His series Leaf (2003) saw him gathering and scanning leaves over 12 months, using the resulting image library to create a continuous looped video — that both draws our attention to the leaves’ detail while also removing us from a concrete sense of space or time. Writing for the NZ Listener, Tessa Laird described the work as “a green geyser of morphing species.”

Lee’s work has been shown widely in Aotearoa, as well as internationally. In 2023, Lee, the eternal traveller, told the NZ Herald that he would love to see Earth in its entirety from space during his lifetime, “even from my deathbed”.