OPENING | JUNGJIN LEE
Jungjin Lee made these photographs in Arizona, New Mexico, and Canada, between 2015 and 2016.
The desert seems to ask for a wide picture. There is so much of it — mountain, ground, sky, the long line where they meet. Lee turned the frame the other way. Her pictures are tall and narrow, and each one holds very little: a slope, a stretch of bare ground, a few plants, the place where earth ends and sky begins.
The desert does not shrink for being seen this way. Looking at a narrow piece of it, you feel more strongly how far it runs past the edge. What she left outside the frame is still out there. It goes on in the mind instead of on the paper.
This is what the title means. Not the land opened up, but an opening cut to look through.
The shape comes from somewhere. Lee brushes photographic emulsion by hand onto hanji, Korean mulberry paper, and the long vertical sheet is the shape of a hanging scroll. She studied calligraphy as a child. The two traditions agree on one thing: a few marks, and around them a blankness that is not empty.
She has said she wants to look with a vacant mind — not hunting for meaning, not naming a place before she has seen it. She is not interested in describing landscape. The desert lets her see further into herself, and what she wants is to turn the feeling of standing there into a picture.
Robert Frank, whose assistant she once was, called her work landscapes without the human beast. No one appears here. Each picture is still a portrait. It shows no face, only how a person stands before the world.