Joyce Yu-Jean Lee

I had the privilege of learning about Ms. Lee at her art talk the other night, and it was fascinating to listen to an artist discuss a medium about which I previously had no knowledge. I also appreciated gaining some understanding about how she came to be an artist. She was born in Dallas, Texas to Chinese Immigrants, and she never thought she would become an artist. But after 9/11, she said that her perspective changed and she knew she wanted to shift her career focus to something she was passionate about.
Lee said one of her goals with her projection art is to make the viewer spend more time looking at her creation since the average museum goer only spends about 3-8 seconds looking at a painting. In order to do this, her pieces incorporate subtle movement that engages the viewer. Much of her work is a commentary on human interaction and perception. for example, she shared a piece that showed a woman staring out a window that overlooked the ocean as ships and boats passed. She explained that the verticality of the window panes represents the metronome of life and the speed at which we perceive it. Regarding human interaction and how we experience humanity differently, she creates projects like the Firewall Internet Cafe. The aim of the Firewall Internet Cafe is allow the audience to see firsthand the censorship that takes place in China. Viewers are able to search terms in Google while the program she collaborated on simultaneously searches the same term on a Chinese search engine. This demonstrates the limited or altered results presented to people living in China so they're unable to find anything negative about the country.
Other projection artworks that really stood out to me were the immersive, 360 projection that served as a commentary on consumerism and the constant whirlwind of media persuasion, the collaboration she did with a traditional Japanese painter where she projected his work onto sand, and the interactive projection art she did celebrating the Islamic faith. This last one she did as a way of countering the animosity expressed towards Muslims, though she said it was never intended to hold a political narrative. She said this work was different in that if you didn't know her creation was centered around prayer rugs, you could still appreciate the art as something simply beautiful. In order to create it, she traced herself praying three times a day and then scanned these tracings to create a virtual art piece that moved in patterns that reflected those of traditional prayer rug patterns. It was an incredible concept and execution, and of her pieces shown, I found this one to be the most moving and beautiful.