This piece is part of Transpacific Literary Project’s monthly translation column.

From September 2024 through 2025, The Margins’ Translation Column will feature art by South Korea-born, United States-based artist Juyon Lee, whose architectural installations play with light, distance, and perception.

The Transpacific Literary Project’s editor first met Lee at an artist’s residency in East Haddam, Connecticut. While there, Lee showed a few pieces from what became the series Wet Photographs. For the series, she takes photographs from two different places, cuts them into strips, and weaves the strips together. The resulting weave is again photographed and printed. She then pours resin over the new photograph, resulting in a mounted sculpture of undulating weaves of paper that looks perpetually wet. The original images are either distinct or vague, depending on where the light hits the sculpture and where the viewer is standing. 

The process is reminiscent of translation—the distance it can traverse, its vagueness and clarity co-existing, its inherent instability. Lee later mentioned that she had been thinking about translation and the transpacific with regards to her work, so it was only apt for her image-based sculptures to accompany a new batch of essays and translations in the Transpacific Literary Project. 

Below is an email conversation TLP had with the artist. It has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you first come into art?

I’m not sure if there’s a single encounter of sorts that led me into making art. 

Ever since I was little, I always enjoyed making things with my hands. Whenever I felt bored, I would make up my own project or a mission to make things. I often drew quietly in a corner wherever I was. What drawing meant to me transformed over the years. 

I grew up with my maternal grandmother until age ten and immigrated to the United States after my mom secured a job in the States. I didn’t know any English when I moved and had a hard time communicating with those who didn’t speak Korean. I think those frustrating moments led me to draw even more, to hold onto a language with which I felt comfortable and could express myself well. Even if I didn’t speak English, my drawing skills became proof that I was capable of expressing myself. 

My mom told me a long time ago that she wanted me to be an artist or musician even before I was born. She often listened to classical music and read books with images of paintings. She wasn’t too familiar with contemporary art then, but she was always interested in art and had a lot of respect for artists or people who express themselves creatively. Perhaps I encountered art for the first time when I was in her womb. 

How do the concepts of translation and the transpacific show up in your art?

In my ongoing image-based works, I weave two photographs from different times and give a sculptural dimension to the woven photos. There are two series of works that use similar weaving techniques. One deals with light phenomena, and another is based on a personal experience with my family: my grandfather’s passing. For both series, I weave photos and photograph the woven photos. I then print them on materials like fiberglass or hanji, which is a traditional mulberry paper handmade in Korea. I then apply transparent, membrane-like materials such as resin and glass to the printed images. For every process I apply to the images, alterations and changes occur—they are often out of my control. I use the images as a departure rather than as an arrival or a final outcome. 

Like memories or how one narrates their experience, the work changes over time with more layering and material applications. I see this as a process of translation. I think translation is the essence of communication, especially when one attempts to share their experiences with someone else. There’s a sense of loss but also an attempt to connect, to bridge the differences. With my work, I aim to make objects that invite viewers to new encounters and experiences.

The specific series that began with my grandfather’s death allowed me to think about images as a transcontinental, transtemporal language. When my grandfather died, several of my family members sent photos of the wake and the funeral in our Kakaotalk group chat. I used FaceTime, videos, and photos to remotely be part of the grieving experience with my family. For each set of woven photos, I work with a photo from Korea and a photo from where I was physically during the funeral. The weavings are attempts to bridge the distance, but it also interests me how some parts of the images are hidden or partially revealed when these two photos come together to form a third image. A sense of absence is always present in the weavings, and in each photo as well. Images are ghosts. And in this digital era, they can travel anywhere with electricity. 

Lee went on to describe the new exhibit she’s mounting at the TCNJ Art Gallery in Ewing, New Jersey, which includes glass photos, LED and neon lights, as well as a body of water. She often describes her work as “lens-making,” the making of material through which one can see other things. In the process of making a thing in order for one to see, one can be faced with the instability of this perception, its fluidity. Which is the same with language, and which is the same with translation.