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As early as 1998, Moonjoo Lee (1972 ROK) began documentation of areas under urban renewal scheme omnipresent in Seoul, her home city, and its satellite towns with photographs and paintings. She continued this practice later in the United States, where she discovered a large number of similar areas. Since then, documenting the transitory aspect of urban space and its constant state of upheaval, has been a key topic of her creative work, in addition to the related social consequences of this kind of large-scale redevelopment, which can often mean exclusion and the loss of values and their homes for a certain group of people.
Moonjoo Lee’s large-scale works depict the continuing cycle of urban expansion, construction, decay, demolition and reconstruction from the artist’s perspective. Her works always demand site-specific research, which Lee carries out over a long period of time. Her multi-panel pieces and serial formats reveal an integrated vision comprising panoramic perspectives of specific sites where the past, present and future merge into one another. Lee brings several places or different times together in the form of painterly collages.
In Berlin, Moonjoo Lee has tracked down parts of the urban landscape in a state of transition – for example, the site around the “O2-Arena” close to Warschauer Straße; and the Palace of the Republic, currently being demolished – and has documented them photographically over several months. Those photographs which Lee describes as “shadows of reality” function as source images for enlarged black and white photocopies or silkscreen prints. Lee arranges these on the canvas in a patchwork-like way and then works over or supplements through layers of brushwork.
By juxtaposing views of house ruins, new structures, abandoned empty lots, and construction debris on canvas, Moonjoo Lee not only intends to show the concrete, everyday space of our direct environment, but also aims primarily to stimulate a metaphorical understanding of this space as one of values and possibilities.
Moonjoo Lee, born in South Korea in 1972, lives and works in Seoul. Lee is the 2007/2008 grantee of the Arts Council Korea within the context of the International Studio Programme at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien.