Moonjoo Lee

Moonjoo Lee works with painting and collage techniques. Many years ago in her home city Seoul, she began documenting its omnipresent areas of urban renewal – the so-called “redevelopment sites” – in photographs and painting, and she has retained this practice to the present day. Since then, the transitory nature of urban landscapes has constituted a key topic in her work, as well as the related question of the social consequences of this kind of redevelopment; for many people, it can mean exclusion and the loss of their homes. Moonjoo Lee’s large-format, serial works – most of them diptychs and triptychs – reveal the artist’s perspective on the continuing cycle of urban expansion, construction, decay, demolition and reconstruction, and always require site-specific research. To equal degrees, they reflect the past, present and future. In Berlin, too, Moonjoo Lee has discovered sections of the urban landscape in a state of upheaval and has brought these together in painterly collages on canvas. The photos that she produces first, as “shadows of reality” (Lee), function as patterns for large-format black and white copies or silkscreen prints, which Lee arranges on the canvas in a patchwork-like fashion and finally works over or supplements using layers of brushed paint. Moonjoo Lee not only intends her works as documentation of the daily changing space of our direct environment, she also aims to stimulate a metaphorical understanding of this space as one of values and possibilities.