Jin Han Lee, Extended Realities

About

Lee’s painting is a joyous and often humorous representation of her personal life experiences, with an aesthetic problem at its core. In the course of her recent research in the UK, Lee identified differences between Western and Korean concepts of time in abstract painting practices that she strives to reconcile. To challenge the known figure/ground relationship in painting, Lee seeks ‘to undermine both Renaissance perspective and the flatness of Modernism by combining both’. It is this interest in a clash of space and time that prompted Beaconsfield to introduce Jin Han Lee to artsXR, a collective of three artists who are at the forefront of research and practice in digital immersive technologies, where conventional space and time are turned upside down. 

In May 2021, Lee took up lockdown residence in Beaconsfield’s Upper Gallery space to make new paintings and–in the same time frame–explore the possibilities offered by drawing in immersive, three dimensional online environments. The works in the Upper gallery reflect this two-way influence.

In VR I was able to pull the brushstroke out from perspectival space, into three dimensional, sculptural space. The headset requires a different way of viewing. It has no mid-point, distance or depth, but is a manipulative platform… I was literally immersed in a new reality that made me reassess my entire relationship with painterly space. Learning the technology was not the challenge, rather my emotional engagment with it: my calligraphic gesture acquired an expansion of nuance.

B_T6 Jin Han Lee Extended Realities is the sixth in the series Beacon_Transitions: a lockdown experiment wherein a virtual portal is opened by Beaconsfield for artists to explore in conjunction with the physical site.   

 Join artsXR and Jin Han Lee online (wherever you are in the world) on Saturday 21 August at 14.00 GMT, to discuss the implications of online artworks and emerging NFT economies. 

To book your place email anna@beaconsfield.ltd.uk