At the Hirshhorn Museum, an ominously beautiful cloud of hundreds of plastic bottles hangs from the ceiling. Further north, at the Kreeger Museum, an aluminum photo collage reflects tiny slivers of the viewers’ faces among images of deep-sea corals. These works intend to connect viewers with environmental issues that often feel far-off. 

Three different District art museums—the Hirshhorn, the Kreeger and the Freer Gallery of Art—currently have exhibitions or events focused on environmental justice and the climate crisis, bringing environmental issues to life in a way that science and data rarely can.

The first puzzle of the Kreeger Museum’s “Perplexity” is “Where is it?” Pieces by seven former Hamiltonian Artworks fellows are scattered through galleries filled primarily with items from the permanent collection — and even installed in a fireplace, which is where Amy Boone-McCreesh’s “Good Luck Charms” hangs. The goal is to juxtapose the new works with the Kreeger’s mostly 20th-century holdings.

‘Together’ is a word which carries unusually poignant resonances right now in the midst of a global pandemic. The fact that churches worldwide forewent assembling for celebrations of Pentecost—that day of great gathering together of God’s Spirit and the nations—serves as a case-in-point for our situation.

Home Alone Together: We are told that home is where the heart is, but also that, while we can travel the world in search of what we need, we must return home in order to find it. Home has been described as the centre and circumference, the start and finish, of most of our lives. That may be particularly so at this time, in both its constraining and revelatory senses. Home can be a place of abuse which it is imperative to leave but may also be a shelter from storms and the place where our most important work is done.

In the exhibition REDIRECT, the inherent risks of our social media landscape—exposure, error, loss—are reflected through installations by seven artists who approach contemporary technology both deliberately and cautiously.

Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a network of artist-run spaces in several U.S. cities, aims “to collectively bring people together, expand connections and build community through artist-initiated exhibitions, projects and curatorial opportunities.” Curated by Suzanne Dittenber, the Greenville, S.C., chapter’s REDIRECT show at Revolve’s RAMP Gallery furthers that goal with work that “critically or philosophically engages with technology” and finds each artist “examining the web, social media, mobile devices or other contemporary technology with a calculated sense of intentionality or caution.”

I was interviewed by James Coomarasamy of BBC Sounds

I was interviewed by China Unscripted in #42 Hacking China’s Censorship | FIREWALL Cafe (podcast).

HKFP speaks to artist Joyce Yu-Jean Lee about her interactive art project “FIREWALL.”

Using photographs and video, this local artist focused on windows, skylights and peepholes. Exhibited in a darkened room and illuminated by pinpoint spotlights, her small, glossy photos showed luminous details from such notable structures as Rembrandt’s house and the Great Wall of China. These were supplemented by two video-performance pieces that depicted people inside small areas of light, offering mini-narratives of entrapment and potential escape.

If you look hard enough at the Great Firewall of China, beneath the policy documents and internet code and rooms filled with dim screens, you might find an unexpected participant: yourself.

Lee’s Work Explores Media’s Impact and The Search for Hope in a Dystopian Culture

WOOC correspondent Dan Phiffer spoke to artist Joyce Yu-Jean Lee about Internet Censorship in China as part of his ongoing Data Justice series.

Multimedia artist Joyce Yu-Jean Lee presented footage of her art installations, which exemplify how visual culture shapes notions of truth and the “other” on Friday, Feb. 16 in Kendall Hall as part of the College’s Brown Bag series.

US president Donald Trump’s warning to North Korea, how to take care of an oil fund worth of $1trn, plus a round-up of Wednesday’s Asian newspapers.

A Group Exhibition at Gallery CA Explores America’s Uneasy Melting Pot

I put on the headphones that are part of Joyce Yu-Jean Lee’s ‘Red vs. Blue Polarity,’ in the group show “Whatchamacallit” at Gallery CA, and a noisy barrage of cameras clicking and flashes flying is the only audio accompanying a video of Donald Trump at a press conference

“Hoof prints? Wait, maybe coffee beans?” We trade guesses as we examine the shape repeated across the long piece of brown paper. It’s simple — an outline made by a few contour lines — but duplicated 84 times in 7 different colors.

Manhattan-based artist Joyce Yu-Jean Lee never guessed she was in for a bit of international intrigue and even global headlines when she launched a show and accompanying discussion panels in February at a couple of alternative venues on the Lower East Side.

在智能手機和家用電腦遍佈大街小巷的時代裏，網吧似乎並不是什麼明智的商業決策。它開在中國城附近，隱匿在一大片畫廊之中。毫不起眼的玻璃門前擺着一塊小黑板，上書：防火牆網吧」（Firewall Cafe），免費使用。

It was supposed to be an art exhibition exploring China’s censorship of the Internet. It became an example of how that censorship can reach all the way around the world, even onto Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

網路長城有多威？台裔女孩開網咖讓老美體驗 中國審查言論的「網路長城」防火牆威力無窮，但除了中國網友之外，其他國家的人很少有機會親身體驗。美國台裔裝置藝術家李玉瑾最近就開了一家特別的網咖，店內每個座位分別有兩台電腦，其一使用Google搜尋引擎，另一部則是使用中國最大的搜尋引擎「百度」，邀請參觀民眾來體驗看看，同樣的議題在「有牆」和「無牆」的狀況下，會搜出什麼樣的結果來。

Established by video and installation artist Joyce Yu-Jean Lee in collaboration with technologist Dan Phiffer, the exhibition FIREWALL Internet Cafe NYC at Chinatown Soup enables visitors to navigate the internet as users in China do, filtered through the Great Firewall

Firewall Internet Café is a fascinating pop-up exhibition that allows visitors to simultaneously search images on Google and the Chinese search engine, Baidu.

This story has all the elements of a 1990s cyberpunk thriller: hackers, foreign government agents, and multinational corporations.

This interview is a continuation of the discussion with curator Patricia Miranda and artists Claudia Hart, Carla Gannis, Victoria Vesna, Laura Splan, Cynthia Lin, Joyce Yu-Jean Lee, and Christopher Baker around the TechNoBody exhibition

On January 23, 2015, TechNoBody opened at Pelham Art Center in New York, a group exhibition exploring “the mediated world’s impact on and relationship to the physical body in an increasingly virtual world.”

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee’s work is full of surprises. It is both sublime, and mesmerizing. Were her work static it would constitute a focal point, a centerpiece, yet her moving and changing images beckon the viewer, imploring them to stay, to reflect, to think.

An arrangement of test tubes containing color-coded genetic material; a wearable garden that purifies the air; an installation inspired by the periodic table — these artworks all incorporate components of STEM, an educational curriculum that is an acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. They are currently among more than 40 pieces on view in “Steam,” a new exhibition at ArtsWestchester’s Arts Exchange.

Two satellites set for launch Sunday will soon be in the hands of ordinary people because they run on a tiny microchip that anyone can program.

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee is a recent MFA graduate from MICA. She currently lives and works around Baltimore, both showing locally and teaching adjunct graduate classes at MICA.

State Metro, April 27, 2013

If you have been in the Ath lately, you may have stopped by the new show at the Silber Gallery. The exhibition, Perspectives: a Look through Cultural Lenses, is a video installation project using mixed media to explore the effect of Western and Eastern art history and culture on the artist Joyce Yu-Jean Lee.

In performative installation Made in China, Joyce Yu-Jean Lee operated a cart from which she sold small red and gold packages for five dollars, manufactured in the United States and branded with an image combining a star from the American flag and the Apple logo.

The Capitol Skyline Hotel will look different over the next three days. The (e)merge art fair has brought in 152 artists and 80 galleries to set up installations, paintings, sculpture and site-specific works that transform the hotel in an art gallery for up-and-coming artists.

Even though Joyce Lee paints with Renaissance masters in mind and exhibits her work in art galleries, she transcends chilly white walls with cinematic presentations that she calls “projection paintings.”

Hamiltonian’s “New Now” exhibition introduces its five newest fellows, who collectively could be described as muted and cerebral with a hint of design. Joyce Lee appropriates light and structure from Old Master paintings in her pastel drawings, which she uses as backdrops for her videos—by forcing viewers to stare longer at the works than they otherwise would, she transforms self-reflection into aimlessness.

Conner Contemporary Art co-founders Jamie Smith and Leigh Conner believe in the viability of emerging artists from the D.C. area, as displayed in Academy, their yearly survey of MFA/BFA standouts from the D.C.-Baltimore area