Meditation and Body of Light Series
Suwon Lee
The camera is a unique tool, an objective mechanism through which we can look at ourselves as in a mirror and freeze that image in time. Throughout my life, I have constantly faced the arbitrariness of successive social and cultural identifications and labels. Instead of confirming one identity over another, I seek to recognise in myself a fluid and limitless identity. Still, it is important for me to be able to say, ‘This is me’, to leave for the future an image that can say, ‘This is how I looked when I was alive, not through someone else's eyes, but through mine’, to say, ‘I existed’. It is not narcissism. It is a way of knowing myself, of seeing myself and accepting myself as I am. Because when you see yourself, you can rework and overcome anything.
Much of art and life as a woman is this struggle to accept and love ourselves and our bodies. Even the slimmest and most beautiful women in the world have trouble with self-image; we still feel trapped by the conventions of beauty and age that a patriarchal society has imposed on us. Our physical bodies are our vehicles in this life, but we are also made of subtle energy that runs through every cell.
This project distills all these concerns and consists of self-portraits made during lockdown in the intimate environment of my bedroom (Meditation and Body of Light Series). In Nude Descending a Staircase III, I am referring directly to Marcel Duchamp's iconic 20th-century painting. This time, a woman portrays herself walking down the stairs of an abandoned store in central Madrid during the peak days of COVID lockdown. As Duchamp said, ‘Since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to imagine the unknown four-dimensional object whose shadow we are’. This body of work is an attempt to glimpse that corporality that goes beyond the physical—to bring and use our body as an instrument to reveal light.
Finally, I want my work to encourage listening—to provide a boomerang observation. My hope is that whoever experiences it turns their attention to themselves in the same movement, like someone looking in a mirror.
Suwon Lee (b. 1977, Caracas, Venezuela) is currently based in Madrid, Spain. Through photography and various media, she tracks her passage through this lifetime. In this sense, her work is an open-ended, existential, and ongoing process, determined by the events of her life. She uses her condition as a cross-cultural woman, daughter of Korean migrants born in Venezuela and then forced to migrate, to question notions of identity, time, territory, embodiment, exile, and affectivity. She is a hybrid, a being who questions herself and transforms constantly, adapting to each context, thus adding a new layer of being to her work with each opportunity.
Lee has exhibited individually in Caracas, Madrid, and in international group shows such as the Guangzhou Image Triennial curated by Gerardo Mosquera (2021); Vincent Price Art Museum, California, USA (2018); Arizona State University Art Museum, USA (2017); Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, France (2013); Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2014); the 9th Bienal do Mercosul (2013), and Biennial of the Americas 2013: Draft Urbanism. She has contributed to many other shows in the US, Brazil, Venezuela, Panama, Spain, Colombia, Chile, Seoul, and Paris, among others.
Lee’s works are in the collections of MoMA in New York (USA), Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (USA), Cisternos Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) in Miami (USA), Colección Banco Mercantil (Venezuela), Museu de Arte Brasileira da Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (Brazil), and in various private collections in Venezuela, Colombia, USA, Spain, Germany, Costa Rica, Argentina, and Puerto Rico.
Lee studied photography at the Speos Paris Photographic Institute in 2001–2002. In 2006, she took the PHotoEspaña Masterclass with German photographer Axel Hütte and subsequently travelled with him on several photography trips in Latin America, Europe, and Asia from 2006 through 2019. She also studied with Nelson Garrido in his experimental photography workshop in Caracas, Venezuela (2007).
In addition to her career as a visual artist, Lee co-founded and was co-director of the Venezuelan artist-run space Oficina #1 (www.oficina1.com) for more than ten years (2005–2015), helping to launch the careers of emerging artists from Venezuela.