Ji Sun Lee's
Quotidian: Documenting Everyday Life
July 13 - August 10, 2012
Opening Reception: Friday, July 13, 8PM - 10PM
Artist Talk: Friday, August 3, 6PM

The daily occurrences of city living are selectively captured then dynamically rendered through a prism of color and sound. Artist Ji Sun Lee codifies her daily, routine activities as a way of visualizing and gaining insight into the greater, total event of her life. The people, places, things, and processes that cumulatively define who she is are unique occurrences but they are also common experiences shared by everyone. This urban study is a recombinant examination of the global DNA that keeps the human organism concentrated in blocks of activity that are specific to the locale yet universal in addressing its needs. Six works depict and comment on how we live: Commuting, Shopping, Eating, Dressing, Residing, and Sharing. Lee succeeds in transforming the trivia of daily life into major signifiers.

Emblematic of the entire exhibition are the bus rides in Seoul and New York, presented as parallel experiences in which the images are each an abstract movement of color bound to the ambient sound within the buses. The tension between the abstract and the real offers a digital koan so typical of Lee’s work: “My daily life in Seoul and the time I spent in New York are memories that are selections by their very nature. Recollecting and reconstituting them as visual code creates a meta-level of remembrance that is similar to information graphics but different in representing a micro view of personal data that leads to a macro view of life.”

Ji Sun Lee maps the minutiae of contemporary life into patterns that emerge from the seemingly random and arbitrary. In the process the artist distills the essential, suggesting that while insignificant on an individual level, on a group or mass scale the impact of our activities are great and have vast implications not least of which are the aesthetics tooled here. Riding the New York City M5 bus in 2010 is Ji Sun Lee’s original source of inspiration.

New media artist and interactive designer Ji Sun Lee studied Industrial Design at Sookmyung Women’s University and Interactive Telecommunications at New York University. She has worked for major technology companies in Korea as an engineer and IT consultant. Lee is currently a doctoral candidate in Visual Communication Design at Seoul National University and working on projects of image visualization using Processing and other physical computing software.

Ji Sun Lee is a professor in the Department of Visual Communication Design at Sookmyung Women’s University.