Map of Amazon,  6”x8”, watercolor on paper, 2007

Jeeyun Lee

Jee Yun Lee's work combines the thousand-year-old artistic traditions of her homeland Korea with the confrontational edge of contemporary life in New York, where she is currently based. Her oil paintings, lavish and jagged landscapes and still life paintings asserted in bold strokes, have been described as "... fraught with the pure pleasure... of painting." Arguably, the scale and intensity of her "map" series represented the critical turn in direction for Lee. By the time of Lee's 2003 solo exhibition at New York City's Grace Institute, the artist described:
I do not shy away from the thorny side of life. It is a symbol of my experience, in the act of creating and criticizing, to break free from sentimentality or heroism.
                   At home in a variety of mediums, it is perhaps Lee's watercolors that most clearly display the freedom of which she speaks, favoring the immediacy of accuracy over the starkness of reality. For the past several years, Lee has been transferring her visions to the digital realm, exploring the boundaries of the medium while strongly maintaining and reaffirming her own artistic ground.