Jae Hoon Lee

I am an Auckland-based Korean-born artist whose practice explores the unstable relationship between body, landscape, place and identity. my experience of migration from Seoul to the United States and ultimately Aotearoa. New Zealand has shaped an ongoing interest in displacement, belonging and the ways places are experienced through memory, movement and perception.

Working across digital photography, moving image, installation and sculpture, I construct landscapes from photographs gathered during travel and everyday observation. Rather than treating photography as a fixed record of a particular moment or location, I manipulate, repeat, layer and recombine images to produce landscapes that appear familiar yet remain impossible. The resulting images occupy a space between documentation and invention, reality and imagination.

This approach extends from my early experiments with flatbed scanning, through which I recorded changes and details of my own skin. The body became an important point of departure for considering difference, temporality and the relationship between individual and environment. My later landscapes transpose this bodily awareness onto mountains, oceans, clouds, trees, rocks and urban spaces, creating environments that seem to possess their own shifting, unstable identity.

Technology is not simply a tool within my practice but a means of questioning how reality can be constructed and perceived. Digital manipulation, aerial imagery, video and computer-generated elements allow multiple places, times and perspectives to coexist. Across these forms, I explore boundlessness, transformation and simultaneity, proposing landscape not as a static geographical fact but as a fluid, subjective and continually becoming space.