In assembling an image bank that references Jae Hoon Lee’s experience as a cultural wanderer, Lee has mainly been collecting source materials in India, Nepal, Egypt, Indonesia, Antarctica and other countries he has recently visited. His daily collecting habit has so far expanded to include elements such as leaves, urban scenes, daily objects and banal accidents – random situations and happenings on the street. Lee then digitally manipulates some of these images, layering multiple single images that have been taken over a long time to create a single almost seamless new image. What at first glance looks like a still photograph, documenting a single instance, in fact contains the traces of multiple instances and views. In this way Lee’s images combine reality and dreams, bringing together the photorealist documentary tradition and the fictional possibilities of new technologies. His images collapse time and space in much the same way digital technology increasingly dominates and manipulates our understandings of the world around us.

Jae Hoon Lee (born 1973) studied sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute, graduating with a BFA. In 1998, He immigrated to New Zealand and completed an MFA in Intermedia art at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. Lee was awarded the Antarctica New Zealand Arts Fellowship, allowing him to live and work at the Scott base camp in January 2012. Recently, Lee’s work has been internationally exhibited in Korea, China and Australia.