Jongsun-Jay Lee
Brooklyn, NY
Residency: May-June 2011
About the Artist:
Jongsun-Jay Lee was born in Daegu, South Korea. Ms. Lee began her art education at Montgomery College (MC) in Rockville, Maryland. She completed her BFA (2007) at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, Maryland. She graduated summa cum laude. She earned her MFA (2009) at the Rinehart School of Sculpture at MICA. As encouragement to her artistic aspirations, Jongsun received a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Award from the U.S. Department of Education.
Jongsun-Jay has participated in various artist residencies, including the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA; the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT; Sculpture Space in Utica, NY; and the Beijing Studio Center in Beijing, China. Ms. Lee has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. She lives and works in New York City.
Project Descriptions:
My work offers the viewer an appealing surface, which only barely hides layers of deeper meaning. Oscillating between attraction and repulsion, between traditional Asian motifs and contemporary Western themes, I try to bring my audience a little closer to the ambivalent heart of humanity’s ineluctable social drama.
When I look carefully, I see rice in almost everything, but there are some places where it cannot be found, and obviously it is not available to everyone. It seduces those who are hungry, but it has other significance for those who are not.
Knot, Unknot, And Again Not
This project involved four parts: research, making, installation, and performance.
After some study on the issue of worldwide hunger and different kinds of rice, I focused on making rice sculptures in the form of bowls. I made thousands of these containers and installed them on top of 18 white circular bases, grouping them in various arrangements according to shapes and hues.
This final stage of this installation was a performance in conjunction with local musician Michael Patrei and his band “The Swordfish Trombones” at Pier’s & Blake in Utica. This performance incorporated improvised sounds and body movements, using musical instruments, audio equipment, bare feet, and gestures. Viewers were also a part of the performance. They were standing around the exhibition space, and I tried to connect them to the installation by dancing and weaving between them and the sculptures. Through this project, I try to convey physical and psychological emptiness. At the same time, the bowls are empty, as if waiting to be filled.
Catch!
Catch! encompassed installation, performance, and interaction with the public.
For this project, I turned Sculpture Space’s foundry area into an outdoor stage 48’ x 36’. I stenciled the floor with thousands of blue stars on white paper and painted an aluminum bucket yellow to match my costume. The bucket was filled with rice, and hung on a hoist approximately 20 feet off the ground. Scott Hartmann was in charge of moving the rice bucket, and the Swordfish Trombones created the sounds that complemented the actions.
A cascade of rice poured down on my head, and I wonder if the sound of falling rice conjures up the image of masses of hungry, churning stomachs. After a few moments, I tried to catch individual grains with a pair of chopsticks, an apron, and other kitchen utensils. In the end, I gathered the rice in my apron and offered it to the audience. They apportioned it in brown paper bags to take home or share it with others.
High & Low (from Work-In-Progress exhibition)
This work tries to convey and measure the unseen social dimensions of hunger on a global scale.
I installed two white laboratory boxes, and on their shelves, I displayed various types of rice in glass jars. In addition, I arranged rice bowls on the upper and lower levels according to a particular configuration.
This installation refers to the traditional Korean way of storing clean rice bowls in the kitchen. They were all placed face down to prevent dust from entering and stacked high to save space. However, the arrangement also indicates the status of the household by the number of rice bowls and what type of bowls they have in their kitchen. In my work, rice becomes identified with bowls by the thousands, with each of the almost countless seeming objects representing an instance of hunger worldwide.
These projects would not have been possible before coming to Sculpture Space. Staff, board members, local artists, local art lovers, and my fellow resident artists went the extra mile with me to make sure my efforts reached fruition. I am deeply grateful for all of the assistance I received at Sculpture Space.