Biography

Jung Sun Lee is an artist born in South Korea and currently living and working in the Bay Area, California. She studied Fine Art at Seoul National University in South Korea, then learned French at the Institute Catholique De Paris and Sorbonne French Language School while staying in Paris for 2 years. Her experiences living in France sparked an interest in embracing foreign cultures and languages, which influenced her artworks. In 2010, she permanently moved to the United States and settled down in Berkeley, California. She has since lived in Georgia and Massachusetts with her family before returning to California in 2021. These changing residences and experiences of adapting to new surroundings have influenced her work, which explores her Korean-American identity as both a mother and an immigrant. She has participated in several group exhibitions since 2019 in Massachusetts until she moved to San Jose, California. In 2013, she was awarded a national juried show at Arc Gallery in San Francisco. More recently, she had a solo show titled "Modern Scenery" at Four Chicken Gallery, and one of her works was featured in a group show called "Home" at The Drawing Room San Francisco.

Artist Statement

Jung Sun Lee’s works present scenes that reflect her ideas about life. She visualizes discussions about the theme of life through the composition of geometric shapes and lines. She incorporated these visual elements into her work after translating her native language to a foreign language while living in France in her mid-twenties. The process of transforming the form of landscapes into coding with simple geometric shapes is related to her interpretation and expression of language.

As an asian immigrant mother, understanding and accepting a new culture in the new society became a major and critical subject for her. She expands her thematic work from personal experiences to the various subjects such as issues of society, history, and religious stories that are connected to her life. She intends to share these stories with viewers through depicting scenery by composing the source of landscapes from various perspectives. Through theses art practices, she keeps studying about the existence about herself and also the human being who sustains the life on the landscapes of her works. Additionally, she embraces a variety of media such as painting, sculpture, and relief work with paper, fabric, and wood to present the possibility of progressing her ideas into visual artworks.