Nanjoo Lee (She/her)
Nanjoo Lee is an artist who infuses objects with metaphorical narratives to explore female subjectivity through autobiographical and collective memory. Through a multidisciplinary approach encompassing painting, moving image, installation, and text, Lee constructs artworks that possess an intimate and contemplative on the female figures and their experience. Lee is particularly interested in the act of translation and its relationship to her art. She views her creative process as a form of language translation, where mundane objects take on symbolic meaning to convey stories about memory, identity, subjectivity, and societal perception.
Translating practice
Translating practice
Dear Soap
Leakage
Translating Practice
Translating Practice is a painting installation work comprising 60 small pieces of paintings. Lee explores the translation method metaphorically while illustrating a mum’s figure in a domestic environment. Through practice, she looks for the will to translate, that is, the will to embrace imperfections and misunderstandings.
Narcissistic Teleportation
Narcissistic Teleportation is a series of paintings comprising 26 paintings that depict the English alphabet. This work forms a part of the larger project related to soap and bubbles. Its objective is to delve into liminal states, specifically exploring between one’s native language and a newly acquired one. It also explores the threshold between the acts of writing and painting, as well as the borders that separate text and image.
Dear Soap
Through observation and defamiliarization of soap, Nanjoo highlights the relationship between soap and bubbles, perceiving bubbles a the language of soap. The video presents the realities of motherhood in a poetic mood, exploring the artist’s own memories and societal perceptions through the use of metaphors.
