Lee, Jin
American, b. 1961 Korea
In other series of photographs, Lee concentrates on the sensuous experience of a place, and her work functions both as a personal investigation of her immediate surroundings and an attempt to transpose a sense of the sublime onto a more intimate scale. The photographs in Small Mountains (2006-2008) appear to portray imposing mountain crags, but they actually provide close-up views of mounds of road salt and dirt that the artist discovered at various outdoor sites. This series extends Lee’s interest in the physical effects of weather and time, a theme that she introduced in an earlier project documenting the Illinois prairies throughout the seasons. Equally, though, Small Mountains highlights the contingency of our relationship with space. The photographs create ambiguities of scale and require us to negotiate between an appearance that echoes past representations of majestic landscapes and minute details that reveal a more modest reality.
Lee received a BA from Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts (1983) and an MFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (1988). She has been a professor at Illinois State University since 1996.