Joyce Yu-Jean Lee Perspectives: A Look through Cultural Lenses
THE SILBER ART GALLERY Goucher College Athenaeum
Joyce Yu-Jean Lee animates new video works with cross-cultural sensibilities in response to her corner projections that reference Western art history. Juxtaposing her American and Chinese perspectives of pictorial space, Perspectives: a Look through Cultural Lenses compares ways of seeing still and moving images, visual consumption, and ideas of illumination. Transcribing pictorial space into three dimensions, Lee employs an interdisciplinary process of drawing backgrounds or “sets,� performing choreographed gestures, and digitally compositing green-screen footage. Her video animations draw upon art historical painting, film, and video to reframe it in alternative contexts. Curious about how the act of seeing today is transformed by technology, Lee slows her viewers down to contemplate quiet moments they might otherwise miss. In a fast-paced society where media constantly competes for our short attention spans, she challenges viewers to reconsider traditional stories from both her American and Chinese cultural backgrounds, encouraging an ethnographic understanding of still and moving images—and, ultimately, new ways of seeing.
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In one end of the gallery, corner projections expand the Western conventional space of painting into the viewer’s environment, wrapping colorfully depicted architectural interiors around the viewer, while simultaneously turning the physical corner of the gallery walls. In contrast to the depth created by linear perspective, the new works are projected flat and oriented vertically. These new projections allude to hanging Chinese scroll paintings and represent the axonometric, or non-Euclidian, perspective in Eastern painting. Primarily monochromatic, these video vignettes look at a horizonless landscape and turn the contemporary Chinese gaze out toward the American audience. Focused on three pairs of works, Perspectives examines how various cultures have historically depicted illumination—physical, intellectual, and spiritual. The first pair illustrates the figure in landscape, pondering differing viewpoints on the role of the human as a creature relative to the natural environment. The next pair compares the consumption of visual information through mass media, a nationalistic jockeying of global leaders. The last pair explores divergent ideas of spiritual illumination, including concepts of the afterlife and Nirvana.
1. Last Light, 2012, 2-channel video projection, 3:45 min. 2. San Shui Sights, 2012, HD video, 8:00 min. 3. Room to See, 2010, 2-channel video projection, 2:30 min. 4. Catch a Flick, 2011, 2-channel video projection, 2:38 min. 5. Must See TV, 2012, video projection, 2:38 min.
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Joyce Yu-Jean Lee
Perspectives: A Look through Cultural Lenses
October 30 – December 9, 2012 (The gallery will be closed November 20-25 for Thanksgiving break.) ARTIST’S RECEPTION
Friday, November 9, 2012, 6-9 p.m. (Artist’s talk at 7 p.m.)
THE SILBER GALLERY
Goucher College Athenaeum DIRECTIONS
GALLERY HOURS
Baltimore Beltway, I-695, to exit 27A. Make first left onto campus.
11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday – Sunday 410.337.6477
The Silber Gallery is free and open to the public.
(FRONT)
Circle of Light, 2012
video projection, 3:45 min.
The Silber Gallery program is funded with the assistance of grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the state of Maryland and the NEA, and the Baltimore County Commission on the Arts and Sciences.
www.goucher.edu/silber
13213-J1693 10/12