In search of the space between reality and perception. The moment you squint your eyes and tilt your head. Moment of familiar confusion.
Jay Lee (*1993, Seoul, South Korea) is a German Korean artist, living and working in Berlin. He graduated in 2021 as Meinsterschueler of fine arts at UDK Berlin in the class of Monica Bonvicini.
We perform many tasks and process a lot of information during our daily life. However, we do not always consciously think about every single task we perform or information we process. A lot of them are automatically performed and processed, out of our own experiences and practices. Experiences and practices allow us to recognize a pattern, something that is easily predictable, and build a structure around them, eventually making us not require any further thought. As our life becomes more and more complicated, we leave more and more things to autopilot. In his video, photo, installation works, he often seeks out accustomed patterns we take for granted in daily life, in order to break the convention to bring them into the viewer’s attention for reflection.
Untangle
HD Video / 04:00 min / loop / 2015
A documentary-esque video work, where the narration is a run-on sentence describing only the connection between a footage and the one it follows. In other words, a narrative is constructed to connect footage 1 and footage 2, then in the next segment, connect footage 2 and footage 3, independent of footage 1, creating the illusion that the narration is leading to an ultimate point. However, the video loops, never reaching the conclusion, but just giving an unending series of individual connections, not giving the satisfaction of reaching the ultimate conclusion.