About

Biography

Juyon Lee is a South Korea-born artist based in Brooklyn, New York and greater Boston area, Massachusetts. With her interest in the idea of transience and ephemerality and limits and fluidity in perception of time and space, Lee makes multidimensional works composed of architectural elements, functional and nonfunctional objects with ethereal materials like light and air.

Lee has exhibited widely, including NARS Foundation Main Gallery, Jewett Arts Center, Tufts University Art Galleries, and Putty’s Coronation. Lee was an artist-in-residence at NARS Foundation, The Studios at MASS MoCA, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Vermont Studio Center, and more. She is the recipient of notable fellowships and awards, including the Bronx Museum AIM Fellowship, Pilchuck Fellowship, and St. Botolph's Emerging Artist Award. Lee received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and her BA from Wellesley College (summa cum laude).

Artist Statement

In an attempt to materialize such ungraspable things as time and the human relationship to time, my work explores the idea of transience and ephemerality through physical materials. To achieve this process, I arrange functional and nonfunctional objects in absurd relationships. Tangible objects, such as glass orbs and metronomes, interact with ethereal materials like light and air to confuse and rearrange any pre-associations attached to the material. Imbuing the concrete objects with a sense of temporality and intangibility, the abstracted situations in my work invite new meanings through direct experience.

I consider my practice as a gradual process of developing a language to describe the puzzling notion of time. Through an iterative process of making, certain elements of my work like sine waves migrate from one body of work to another. In parallel to this rhizomatic approach to making, I experience light not only as an essential material, but also an existing condition of life that one relies on to perceive, navigate, and communicate in the world. The work embodies its own processual quality and materiality through this use of light.

Giving form to something that is constantly in flux through the use of light, membrane-like objects like blown glass, and architectural elements, my work is scaled for participants to perceive the presence of change in the medium of time. I am interested not only in the change itself, but also how one experiences this change. I weave in varied forms of reflection to shift the focus to the way we perceive things, rather than the thing itself. By constructing abstracted situations in collapsing layers and dimensions, the work meditates on the constantly shifting frames of knowing and questions visual perception as an approximation of truth.