Artists
Photo Credit: NIU Chun-Chiang
LEE Jo-Mei
LEE Jo-Mei
| Location | Australia / Sydney |
|---|---|
| Residency | Artspace |
| Year of the Grant | 2015 |
| Work | Some Studies on Blue |
The concept the artist’s practice illustrates perception and its transformation throughout the daily experience so as to depict how we gaze on the texture of everyday life to explore the sense of memory’s own landscape. By using various methods and media to process memory through recording and transformation, it allows our accustomed experiences to be subjected to change or its original orders to be altered, thereby rebuilding the possibility of review. In this way, it presents the particular poetic lyric in the artworks.
Recent selected group shows include “The Lost Garden”, Eslite Gallery (2014), “2012 Keywords— Asynchronous Lifeworld”, Juming Museum (2012) and “Mark”, Crane gallery(2016). She was also invited to join shows or residency programs in France, Japan, Thailand and Australia.
Thoughts on the Residency Program:
Over this brief two-month trip, I felt unprecedentedly free and driven. To have such wonderful results and joy, I believe, was largely related to the magical country of Australia. During my residency program at Artspace in Sydney, I started with observing and drawing surrounding natural landscape and its purity. Then, I adopted a series of methods to examine nature, developing creative formats and scope of concerns different from before.
The “Some Studies on Blue” project focuses on Blue Mountains that shield over the west end of suburban Sydney, conducing a series of image developments centering on a number of keywords, such as blue, blue haza, and Eucalyptus. Before I entered Blue Mountains, I studied the history of pioneers, and imagined their perspectives when they first came to and explored through this unknown continent. As for myself, also a foreigner, how will I depict what I see?
Blue Mountains’ “blueness,” due to the distance as well as the effect of the Eucalyptus, the plant’s oil vaporizes into air, visually creates a blue landscape, and releases a unique scent. Therefore, I tried to analyze this “blueness” in a romantic way, incorporated it into my paintings, my imagination of the blue haza, and the actual experience of my hiking in the Blue Mountains. Through microscopic and enlarged visual effects and varying distances, I created faithful depictions, captured the scents, layered mental and physical landscapes, and experimented with visual barriers formed by everyday materials. Ultimately, all these things I have done were included in “Some Studies on Blue,” which is the fruit of my residency program, and exhibited in the “Considerate Creations” (2015.10.31 – 2015.11.29) held at Taipei Artist Village.