ARTISTS

Juyon Lee

Guest Curatorial Program (2025)

Through Fragility

Juyon Lee (b. 1995, Seoul) is a South Korea-born artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Having grown
up between Seoul and the greater Boston area, Lee developed a heightened awareness of the
dissonance experienced across time and space. Composed of ethereal elements such as light and
air, tangible yet diaphanous materials like glass and silk, and architectural structures, her
image-based work traces how ephemerality and ontological residues, such as memory and the
subconscious, converge in human experience and perception. Through layered applications of
image, material, and light, her multidimensional work reveals the shifting tension between the
apparent solidity and underlying instability of matter and being, embodying experiences ranging
from grief to the nonlinearity of time.

Lee has exhibited widely, including Episode Gallery (2025), TCNJ Gallery (2024), NARS
Foundation (2023), Jewett Arts Center (2023), New Bedford Art Museum (2023), and Tufts
University Art Galleries (2022). She is the recipient of notable fellowships and awards, including
the Café Royal Foundation Grant for Visual Art, Bronx Museum AIM Fellowship, Pilchuck
Fellowship, and St. Botolph’s Emerging Artist Award. She participated in artist residencies at
LMCC Arts Center, The Studios at MASS MoCA, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Vermont Studio
Center, and more. Lee holds her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts
University and her BA from Wellesley College (summa cum laude).

in, Through Fragility, Lee’s recent work begins with mourning the death of her grandfather. Unable to be physically
present, she witnessed his final moments through a video call—an experience that led her to
question the very meaning of being. Her new work, Weighing of the Light (2025), reflects on how,
despite the human condition of mortality, that emerges in front of life’s cycle of birth and death. At
the same time, it points to the way images today are easily transmitted via digital devices, stripped
of weight, density and the social atmosphere they once carried.

In a similar vein, Parabolic Traces(2025) draws on images captured from video calls with family
members who have been living afar. Through fragments of the everyday—text messages,
screenshots and flattened bodily forms recorded in videos—the work visualizes
the physical and emotional distance between Seoul and New York, revealing feelings of
tenderness, longing, absence and loss.

Lee prints photographic images, cuts them into thread-like strips, weaves them by hand, and uses
kiln forming techniques to apply the photographs to glass. This slow, labor-intensive process
weakens the original form of the image, while simultaneously reinforcing its presence. By
repeatedly exposing the photographs to high temperatures and turning them into glass, Lee
reinterprets fragility not as a lack, but as a quality that is built up through time, care and labour.
Though glass may shatter under even a modest external force, it has long functioned as an
inseparable part of photography, protecting the image while also transmitting light to make it
visible. In this exhibition, that complex materiality becomes a generative element, allowing new
qualities to the work of Oh and Lee and operating as part of the photographic body itself.