Grace Yujeong Lee

Catching the Light

Grace's works explore ideas of cultural and personal disconnects through artificial environments. Her work is about paradoxical influences that have shaped her city experience. She feels a sense of alienation and a sense of being overwhelmed at the same time as she takes comfort in the familiar. In her works, duality as a conceptual strategy coexists. The process looks similar to our contemporary life. In our society, we constantly stimulate our senses and challenge all our notions of reality and illusion. We are no longer able to distinguish between imagination and reality and are able to reproduce with complete fidelity. We live in a mediated time where a copy becomes original and our perception of reality is digitally informed. From games to social networking to fake Chanel bags, copies fascinate us and dominate our experience. With these ideas, Grace combines organic and geometric shapes, control and uncertainty, being seen and being covered, the laborious and the lackadaisical, full and empty. So, in her works, these paradoxes are meant to signify an experience of ambivalence and suggest a reexamination of contradictory perceptions in our everyday lives.