JeeYoung Lee and her surreal realities

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JeeYoung Lee is a photographer from South Korea that captures with a camera surreal locations of her invention, without the help of any photo-manipulation program.

In fact, all the material she uses is handmade, shrinking from using a computer by taking care of the minimum details. It's the result of weeks of work, all based on her little studio in Seoul (only 3 x 6 m), where everything is planned thoughtfully and constantly transforms such a small space in more different locations, without ever needing to move from where she started. They're all partly self-portraits, as you can find the artist accurately placed in every photo, acting as part of her creation.
Her art starts from wanting to share stories of her life to representing traditional Korean fables. As the curator Hyewon Yi says: "Lee's constructed realities belong to the "directorial mode," employed since the 1980?s by Postmodernist photographers in repudiation of the Modernist practice that sought truth in the everyday world. Lee's "constructed image photography" may be compared to the works of German sculptor and photographer Thomas Demand...U.S. installation artist and photographer Sandy Skoglund's orchestrated room-size installations. But in contrast to these earlier artists, Lee's subjects are deeply personal and intensely psychological. Drawing upon prodigious powers of imagination, she labors for months to create effects that seem to expand and contract physical space. And always, a lone figure inhabits and completes her narratives. Jee Young Lee assumes the roles of set designer, sculptor, performer, installation artist, and photographer - and she executes them all magically."
She already won numerous prizes and, after showing her art in many Korean exhibitions, from the 14th of February to the 15th of March 2014 she'll exhibit her art for the first time in Europe at the Opiom Gallery, in France, with the title "Stage of Mind".