April 23 – June 29, 2025
My slanted eyes betray my Western tongue, and in this yellow body of mine I deeply understood the meaning of longing and belonging. My pathway into art stems from the necessity to forge a pathway towards representation – of myself, my identity, but also to translate personal experiences into a conversation that resonates universally. I am interested in the semiotics of childhood artefacts and language, and the significance of this mean-making within abstraction. The mugwort – a central image of my current works – become both an image and a mark; at once referencing one of the first familiar things I encountered as a new transplant to New York City, but also acknowledging how this herb – while culturally significant in Korea for its resilience – exists for those same reasons as an invasive species in the United States. I am interested in image capturing, processing, and transferring, and how the lexicon of photosensitive processes mimics those of immigration. I think a lot about the notion of exposure, which I’ve defined as assimilation, and how exposure works within cyanotype processes to capture time-based documentation of whitening, erasure, and the invisibility that comes with the transience of constant migration.
My practice, and the breadth of my interests, tells a fragmented story constantly reassembling itself – a story of how a boy grew into his body and into his home. A story about migrating, and the rituals and labors of that journey. A story about feeling the politicized, fetishized, and abstracted body so deeply long before learning the vocabulary to describe it. A story about dreaming and finally waking up.
About Imprint –
An imprint is a mark formed by pressing something against another; it is a residue of an interaction past, and serves as a reminder for the future. The works presented in this collection of works are imprints of experiments, exercises, and works that serve as formative reminders and cues to Timothy Hyunsoo Lee’s large-scale practices in image capturing, transferring, preservation and deterioration. His works in image transfer techniques highlights a rebellion to, and rejection of, the manic archival practices of photography in the era of smartphones and the Cloud, and how the deterioration of the image through each subsequent transfer process mirrors the natural deterioration of memories. He is particularly interested in the significance of meaning-making when referential points in representation get increasingly obscure, and how it affects our relationship to the original image, and original memory. Within his works in cyanotype printing – an attempt that documenting the ritual of performance, iterations, and endurance that defines Timothy’s practice in the visual arts, he is particularly interested in how the lexicon of this photosensitive process mimics those of immigration, and thinking about the terminology of exposure as assimilation. His abstractions in cyanotype utilizes exposure lengths to capture time-based documentation of whitening, erasing, and ultimately the invisibility that comes with the transience of constant migration – something that he has deeply felt as a child immigrant in the United States.
About Timothy Hyunsoo Lee –
Timothy Hyunsoo Lee is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores the relationship between rituals of (in)visibility, community and the abstracted, queer body. Born in Seoul, South Korea and raised in New York City, he received his B.A. in Neuroscience, Biology and Studio Art from Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT) and his MFA in computational arts from Goldsmiths, University of London (UK). Lee’s background in laboratory research and emerging technologies ushers in an empirical approach to investigating the materiality and precision in his practice, his interests in legacies of craft, representation, and labor, that is complemented with the existential urgency of growing up between cultures. Timothy’s works have been exhibited at venues such as the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Orlando Museum of Art, the Studio Museum, The Wallach Art Gallery of Columbia University, The YoungArts Foundation Gallery, Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid, and La Casa Encendida, with a public project with the MTA Arts & Design (New York). He is currently based between Boston and NYC and lectures at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology W20 Art Studios.
All images Courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani Gallery (Madrid, Spain)
