Jinjoon Lee

  • ABOUT


  • Jinjoon Lee

     

    Jinjoon Lee’s artistic practice is distinguished by a wide-ranging humanistic inquiry into enduring questions arising from the intersection of civilization, nature, and technology. Working primarily in the medium of moving image and utilizing advanced digital tools such as AI and game engines, Lee draws upon an array of ideas and references from such fields as literature, anthropology, history, and politics to create works that are by turns conceptual and poetic, intellectual and emotional.

     

    In Wandering Sun (2022–), for example, his series of immersive installations of game-engine-generated sunrises, the artist integrates such disparate elements as memories of his childhood hometown, NASA data sets of atmospheric particulates, and 11th-century classical Chinese poetry to delve into the perceptual and symbolic dimensions of the contemporary experience of natural landscapes.

     

    In other works such as Good Morning, Mr. G-Dragon (2025), Lee turns his focus to the fraught convergence of culture and technology. Using generative AI and biometric iris data from the eponymous global K-pop star, the artist created a media work that was transmitted via satellite into space. A speculative message sent into the vast cosmos, a meditation on the nature of fame, and a melancholic nod to the optimism of Nam June Paik’s landmark satellite broadcast, Good Morning, Mr. Orwell in 1984, the work is an inquiry into the emotional and spritual depths of human existence in a world ever more permeated by technology. 

    Born in 1974, Jinjoon Lee earned his BFA and MFA in sculpture from Seoul National University before obtaining a master’s in Moving Image Design from the Royal College of Art, London, and a DPhil in Fine Art from the Ruskin School, University of Oxford. He currently serves as a professor on the faculty of the the Graduate School of Culture Technology at KAIST.

     

    Since his debut solo exhibition at the ARKO Art Center, Seoul, in 2007, Lee’s work has been featured at such institutions as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Seoul Museum of Art; Prague National Gallery; Royal College of Music, London; and Korean Cultural Centre UK, London. In 2021, he was selected to exhibit in Bloomberg New Contemporaries, and in 2023, he was invited to be an artist in residence at ZKM | Hertz-Lab, Karlsruhe, Germany. His work can be found in the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Seoul Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan, among other public collections.

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