Red Lodge Clay Center – Short-Term Resident 2022
Jihyun Lee is an artworker working with ceramic sculpture in an expanded field. She was born and raised in South Korea where she earned her BFA and MFA in ceramics at Ewha Womans University. She has currently received her MFA from the Ohio State University. Her work has been featured in multiple exhibitions internationally, as well as throughout South Korea.
Belief and understanding of an object are, in reality, often dogmatic and arbitrary. My art practice begins with a question about the absurdity of the world and systems of understanding which we believe to be absolute. Focusing on man-made knowledge and order, and the social and cultural background created based on those, I explore how such systems engage perception and understanding the world. At the very core of my interest, there lies the questions arise about the gap between perception and reality, imperfection of objective values, and the resulting contradictions and absurdities. With knowledge, intuition slides and experience become limited. Through my body of works, I trace back the genealogy of the tacit promises we believed to be absolute in the name of knowledge and language.
Working with clay, I have maintained concerns on drawing connection between materiality and context of work. The physical properties of clay as well as the chemical transition through firing go beyond a simple change of physical properties, having several symbolic meanings. Universality, transcendence of space-time, temporality, eternity, death and birth, distortions caused by external stimuli. They function poetically throughout many layers of contexts that compose the body of works.