Mrs. Choi Mi Li, director of Gallery Lumiere has been maintaining close relationships with photography galleries, musuems and major art fairs worldwide in order to develop a critical eye through masterpieces of best quality, with a view to introduce Korean photography into the photography market abroad. Gallery Lumiere has been received growing attention for exhibitions featuring carefully chosen masterpieces of the greatest photographers in the world. This year Gallery Lumiere newly established an award “Lumiere International Photography Award (LIPA)” in order to promote development of Korean photography in the world market and to find and support young, gifted photographers from all over the world.

The first edition of LIPA is awarded to Yun Lee (1967-) who is currently working in Germany.

“Private World” is the title of a series of photographs by Yun Lee who, in the juxtaposition of portrait and still life, or indeed in the coalescence of the two genres, has created a series about intimacy. The series simultaneously directs a sharp gaze towards the private environments shaped by the artist’s subjects. By combining extremely close-up shots of her subjects with details and sections of their apartment or studio, she generates interplay between subject and object within which the variously functioning interactions between the two components of the image unfold. Yun Lee captures the private environments of her subjects and reproduces them in her works by close analysis. However, what we really see in her works is not just the portraits of sitters and the private space and objects of them, but rather a world of the artist’s own, who observes, analyzes and reconstruct the reality.

The creative process begins with the portrait. Besides the many portrait shots, from which one definitive image is ultimately selected, the second step involves photographing the different environments. Here, too, multiple pictures are taken of the private worlds of the photographic subjects, one of which is selected to become the pendant to the portrait. This process of selecting one definitive image is like putting together pieces of complex jigsaw puzzle in that the artist needs to find a right place of an image of her subjects to match it to her own interpretation of the image.

She is faithful to traditional methods of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings in terms of colors and composition. The relationship between the subject and the world of objects is based on the formal and structural harmony of the image in its entirety; colors and structures constitute the central criterion for the link between the portraits and the still lifes. Her camera catches facial expressions replete with pensiveness, yearning, cheerfulness and resolution in small-format intimacy, which are juxtaposed with objects drawn from everyday life, which metaphorically visualise the particular character trait and lifestyle of her photographic subjects.

Sleeping Woman

Sleeping woman and beautiful landscapes behind her image…What is she dreaming of?

The series “Sleeping Woman” portrays women; Yun Lee chose women’s world as her subjects, rather than men’s, with which she can truly sympathize. Whereas the “Private World” is about the relationship between her camera and subjects, and subjects and objects, documented by juxtaposition of images, the “Sleeping Woman” generates a new visual language of overlapping of an image of sleeping woman with plain landscapes.

Capturing the moment of sleep is the best way to get close to the subject. The model is entirely exposed to the camera as if there is nothing between them. Caught in her most private moment, she is completely unaware of what is going on around her; she cannot see, listen or feel anything. Open helplessly to the photographer who watches her in sleep and the viewer who looks at the works of the artist, the most secretive and private sphere of a woman appears as double images like two faces of coin.

Yun Lee has created an imaginary world of mysterious feeling, where anything is possible, with a wishful, poetical, or playful touch. The “Sleeping woman” series, which illustrates the image of sleeping models and beautiful, dreamlike landscapes by using Photoshop, is inspired by a renaissance painting, Sleeping Venus (c. 1510) by Giorgione, in which the sleeping Venus and the idyllic landscape are portrayed in perfect harmony. Yun Lee, however, created images of her own identity by adding a touch of modernity and originality to the perfect harmony of the Renaissance work.

The images of women buried in flowers or waves of lake are dream-like and even surreal, as if we crept into their dreams…