Strange Fire

Q&A: The High Wall: JULIE LEE

By Jesse Egner and Kelly Lee Webeck | August 11, 2022

Julie Lee (she/her) is a Korean-American artist from Alabama residing in Pittsburgh, PA. Her lens-based works (primarily collage and photography) explore themes of ancestry and the photograph as existential affirmation. These works have circulated nationally and internationally, encouraging new ways of seeing and representing ideas in contemporary image culture, of being seen, and of speculating historical, psychological reconstructions.

Her work has been exhibited in Columbia University's PostCrypt Gallery, the Curated Fridge, and the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. Her work has also been featured in publications such as the Journal of Art Criticism, Yale University's Asterisk* Journal of Art and Art History, and Hyperallergic.

The High Wall 2022—in partnership with Strange Fire Collective— presents three video works to be projected on the facade of the Inscape Arts Building in Seattle, WA. Inscape resides in a former immigration detention center; because of the building’s history we have selected artists whose work explore broad ideas of immigration, diaspora, and borderlands. We are proud to have chosen Kei Ito, Brandon Tho Harris, and Julie Lee - three artists who examine these themes through the use of photography and the moving image. Although each piece is presented as a video, the artists each utilize the medium and materiality of still photography. Photograms, a vernacular family photo archive, and glitched google map images each make connections about migration, place, community, family, and home.

KW+JE: Hi Julie! Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. We’re so excited to include your piece “to look back is to go forward” in the High Wall 2022 exhibition and we’re looking forward to hearing more about this piece as well as you and your practice. To begin, can you tell us a bit about your background and your practice? 

Julie Lee: I recently graduated from undergraduate, where I was not totally sure of what I wanted to do until a little before COVID-19. I would always go through my family’s photo albums during holidays and as a child, I vividly recall watching our home videos repeatedly. Around December of 2020, before I left to go back to university, the family photographs really stuck with me and lingered in my mind. When the shutdown in March happened and universities across the country went remote (forcing a great number of students to return to their family’s homes), I went back to my parent’s home in Alabama and confronted my fascination with the archives by beginning to integrate and explore them within my art. I found a lot of satisfaction through my research and was really excited about the possibilities for revelations and relief. 

As it is, I’d like to say that my practice is lens-based, utilizing photography and collage as primary media. With my family photographs, I find them to be a way of coping, where they offer understanding and imagination of the histories before me that are not easily spoken. Behind every photograph and every frame, there are different realities where details and gaps are magnified and surveyed. I feel almost like a time traveler where I am seeing glimpses of realities that seem so far but are actually still present nonetheless. Specifically, I am really looking at the matrilineal lineage that comes with me and the women around me: I look back and create work of my observations in order to learn how to move forward and in a way, contribute to these archives for the people after me.

KW+JE: Tell us more about “to look back is to go forward.” How did this piece come to be? 

JL: When I was working on my undergraduate thesis show, I was interested in carving out a space specifically for my paternal grandmother, who this work is mainly about. 

I gathered all of the photographs that depict my grandmother and created a chronological timeline, based on the dates and the people’s appearances. The act of going through these photographs, one by one, and re-recording is a way for me to catch up on this history and further the extent of our document for the sake of our family archives. I witnessed her and her loved ones grow throughout this passage of time that are now frozen and sealed. I noticed these traces and details such as my grandmother accumulating more wrinkles and how tall my older sister was getting as a young girl. The simple act of flipping through photographs provided some catharsis and allowed me to build a relationship with my grandmother (and her loved ones) despite us being miles apart.

The installation of the work reflects upon and is inspired by what I imagine her home might have looked like. An image of her holding onto me while sitting on the floor with a boxy television in the background, as well as a screenshot of family photographs organized on one of her walls, served as the basis for my construction. Paying particular attention to the technology, such as the model of television and the cameras used to take the original photographs, allowed me to create a tangible connection with the past by exploiting the material and commercial qualities of nostalgia our society is prone to experiencing, thereby subliminally bridging the verity of experience and research with the innate romanticism of nostalgia.

This work is a dedication to a specific person from a specific time period, as well as the nostalgia surrounding her and the realm she (or rather, my perception of her) exists in.

KW+JE: In this video, you flip through a set of photographs from your family archive and reveal them to the viewer, which explores an engaging relationship between photography and video. Can you tell us more about the role of photography, video, and their intersection in your practice? 

JL: Susan Sontag wrote that photographs are a slice of time, whereas moving images are a flow of time. In a way, I was taking these puzzle pieces of my grandmother (the photographs, still and fixed images of her) and piecing them together to create a bigger picture that is not wholly accurate or reliable, but still feels real and valid. It’s like taking the shards of a broken statue and piecing it together, even though it will never be the same, the attempt reveals an earnest desire for return.. It is this gesture of yearning which guides me presently, where video allows a space for speculative histories to breathe new life into these archived memories that have long been and collecting dust.

Outside of the filtering, the text, and the glitch/distortions, my video was largely unedited. Moments where my hands slightly tremble, shaking the photo slightly, or where I linger on a frame too long are all left within the final cut. Since I was touching upon subject matter that is very much sensitive and vulnerable to me, I embraced these human imperfections within the work, allowing them to reveal the weight of the performance through the simple gestures of hands. There was such an urgency to create this work and it really shows here.

To be honest, I may not know the precise answer to that question and that is something I intend on continuing and investigating further over time. This is one of the many questions that surround me as I continue in my work, which is exactly what makes being an artist so satisfying for me: that continuous drive to unravel new questions and theorize through intentional practice.

KW+JE: Can you tell us more about the glitch/distortion in this video? 

JL: The whole formatting of the video (glitch/distortion, the greenish filter, as well as the dates playing to the sound of a camera snapping) plays on the popular misconception of memory as video playback. Our memory involves reconstruction and can be not entirely accurate. The glitch/distortion in the video serves as a cue that my perception of these memories is not entirely reliable and that there could be more going on; that this is not the entire story. 

I am my own unreliable narrator and in this video, I gaze at my subject with a nostalgic lens. Viewing these images with such a lens obscures the boundaries between myself and the photographs (as well as the people depicted). It does not provide clarity to the images, it obfuscates.

KW+JE: We’d love to hear more about the archive itself. How did you first come across this family archive and start engaging with it? 

JL: As mentioned before, when the March 2020 COVID-19 major shutdowns happened, a good number of people (including myself) were forced to be in settings (such as their own homes) where they really had to look inwards. Being back in my childhood home so suddenly was a surreal and disorienting experience. Personally, I felt like a stranger in my own childhood home, where the space did not seem as big as before and there was dust in every corner of the house. And yet, these photographs and albums that surrounded this home like a museum contained the faces of my loved ones. They were curated and portrayed to specifically paint these romantic ideals of the self, relationships, and space. 

Much like the wallpaper in my bathroom peeling off to reveal the dirt and grime of the house, these photographs were potentially hiding something more messy and compelling – and I just had to take a closer peek and peel away. I think my way of engaging with these archives comes from a particular dynamic between the tangible artifact that is the family album and the ephemerality of bodily memories. 

Drawing from the photographs in the albums, I saw glimpses of my family as their own individuals, as people outside of the family roles prescribed to them. And in a way, I create work that puts forward my own interpretation and mythology of these people that raised, uplifted, and came before me. I’d like to think that my way of engaging with the archive is my way of mapping and navigating spaces, pasts, and futures; my hope is that this way of engaging with the precious family archive is one that adds to it. 

KW+JE: How has your family received this work? 

JL: With this particular video and the work that was presented alongside it, it was interesting to listen in on their observations. They noticed little details that I did not particularly notice or would give some context behind an image. For example, there is a photograph of my grandmother solemnly looking at the camera, holding onto a railing with a seaside view behind her. In that image, she is actually irritated because the person who took this image had walked in on her when she was trying to be alone and relax. It added a lot of depth and context to the histories which would have been otherwise lost to me by promoting conversation and reflection. While I am not entirely sure of their reception, they seem to support my practice and if anything, push me to go further with my artistic career (I can hear my mother praying that I go to graduate school, haha).

KW+JE: You write about not knowing if you’ll ever see some of these family members again or go visit Korea. Where is home for you? Do you intend to visit Korea in the future? 

JL: It’s hard to say, to be honest. Borders are unreliable and always changing (especially when it’s humans with their own agendas and visions defining them); change is the only constant that surrounds us. It’s hard for me to say that Korea is home because I never lived there, but it can be hard to call the United States home because of that feeling that I am a perpetual foreigner.

I remember whenever my Korean peers went to Korea and came back with stories, I would be so excited and soak in every detail. I would be so hopeful that one day, I would be able to go and have my own memories to make. They were like fairytales to me, much like the ones about America that I would also hear from my community. I am no longer that child and it is hard for me to view either place as home because of that seemingly constant feeling of “I don’t think I’m supposed to be here.”

To this day, I have not gone to Korea and the thing is, I’m fine with that. My perception of Korea and America has muddied, because of their hyper-capitalist states and their participation/facilitation in harmful systems, especially ones which actively hurt my loved ones and me. Yet, a part of me will always want to visit Korea and put some faces to the names of my extended family. It’s just that, without my childhood wonderment, I’m in no particular hurry like before and am okay with where I am at. I could spend time wistfully pondering the “what if’s” but I would only be taking what’s right before me for granted and not allow myself to make the best of what cards have been dealt to me.

KW+JE: What are you working on right now? What’s next for you as an artist? 

JL: I am currently interested in working more with sunlight and shadows, how they affect the physicality of photographs (both texturally and chemically), as well as just wanting to search and watch some home movies. I have a photography series about my father and his introduction to his Korean-American community that I have been working on, and it has really pushed me further into my interest in working with the sunlight and projections of light. Additionally, I’m super focused on land and mapping (maybe I’d be interested in visiting an old childhood home someday…). That’s all I’m going to say on that front, haha.

This summer, I received the Cosmos Care Fund Micro-Grant from The Cosmos, an organization that centers Asian American women’s creativity and wellness and I was recognized in Princeton University’s Nassau Literary Review in their Undergraduate Art & Writing Contest. I am really excited to have my work soon to be exhibited at ESPERANZA Project Space’s To/From the Motherlands and the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh’s Plain Silk, Uncarved Wood. I need to shout-out Spill Stories as their publication project, Powerful Asian Moms will be releasing and I am happy to have been a contributor! I also am going to be participating in a group publication, ROOTS: Korean Diaspora with Andre Lee Bassuet and other artists of the Korean Diaspora.

I am really grateful for having met and worked with many wonderful people and am excited for what’s ahead (a little nervous and unsure, but still excited). What’s ahead is unknown and I may not have all the answers in the world, but I can see that there will be opportunities, chances, and just some interesting times. I’m looking forward to making some discoveries, experiencing more of the world, meeting and getting to know some folks, and making the most of what life has to offer.

KW+JE: Thank you again for taking this time to speak with us. It has been a pleasure learning more about your work, and we’re so honored to include your piece in the High Wall 2022 exhibition!

All images © Julie Lee