Between myth
and the everyday

Lee Jaejeong's practice carries a mythic register from early on. The 〈The Myths of Jeju〉 exhibition (2016), continued in 〈Jeju Myth Korea–Japan〉 (2017), takes one of the densest mythic landscapes in Korea — Jeju, an island whose stories of gods and origins are woven into its very geography — and photographs it not as scenery but as a living myth.

What distinguishes this work is its refusal to separate the mythic from the documentary. The same photographs that record an actual island, an actual terrain, also hold the weight of the stories that place carries. Myth, in his hands, is not illustration; it is a way of seeing what is already there — the narrative undertone beneath the surface of an ordinary landscape.

Through the 2010s and into the 2020s, Lee Jaejeong's camera moved across the contemporary surfaces of Korean society. The 〈Village Theatre — DMZ Residency〉 exhibition (2020) brought him to the borderland; 〈A Wise Way of Living〉 (2021) turned toward the ordinary economy of daily life; 〈Birds Are Not Afraid of the Pandemic〉 (2022) registered the strange suspended time of a society under the pandemic.

His exhibitions also engaged directly with the public events of their moment. The 〈Park Geun-hye Resignation〉 exhibition (2017) sits within this documentary impulse — a photographer recording a society in the midst of a contested public reckoning. Across all of these, his approach holds steady: not to argue, but to record; not to judge, but to look closely at how a society moves through its own time.

This is the through-line of his practice — a documentary gaze that refuses to settle in one place. Society is not a single subject to be captured but a terrain to be crossed, position by position, exhibition by exhibition.

In his recent work, Lee Jaejeong's inquiry deepens toward the nature of the photographic image. 〈Hwasando〉 (2023) gathers the volcanic terrain of the island into a body of landscape work; from there, the questioning turns inward, toward the apparatus and history of seeing itself.

The title 〈Chilsil-paryeoan〉 (2024) is drawn from a real historical term. Chilsil-paryeoan(漆室玻瓈眼) is the name the Joseon-era scholar Jeong Yak-yong gave to the camera obscura — literally, ‘a glass eye in a pitch-dark room.’ In late-Joseon practical learning, it was known and even used to aid portrait drawing. By naming a series after it, Lee places his own photography within a long lineage of seeing through a lens — a history older than the camera, reaching back to the dark room and its inverted image.

〈A Thousand Cameras〉 (2025) extends this reflection outward. If the camera obscura was a single eye in a dark room, the contemporary world is filled with a thousand cameras, a thousand ways of recording and remembering. From the myths of Jeju to the optics of the Joseon scholar, his crossing of Korean society arrives, in the end, at a question about the act of the image itself.