
L'AiR Arts, Paris, France. 2025 September.
About
My practice observes how materials hold and carry memory across different speeds of time and distinct environments—whether familiar or foreign. I view materials as vessels: holding air bubbles, textures of places, and colors from origins. Whether I’m mixing paints from natural pigments and red algae binders, melting glass, working with beeswax, cooking starch-based bioplastics, or capturing surrounding elements through the chemistry of alternative photography, I am engaged in a constant dance between what is frozen, what is melting, and what is decaying.
I assemble these materials to visualize different passages of time. My bioplastic sculptures embody decaying and durational time. Cooked from local grains and starches, these forms carry personal and geographical stories in their very chemistry. They are accessible yet ephemeral—designed to warp and shift, resembling the malleable human memory.
My experimental photography—with made or found elements—captures flashy, light-speed, momentary time: a split second imprinted by light. In some works, beeswax is layered onto photographs like skin, creating a tactile membrane between image and memory.
Glass holds both (re-)cyclical and frozen time. Like glacier ice or bioplastic, it traps air bubbles—archives of breath at the moment of making—within a solid form. Yet its solidity is fragile. It waits only for human breath and heat to flow again, ready to be formed into a completely different shape in a completely different time.
My paintings are maps of the earth and sea. I create them from scratch using pigments I’ve extracted or collected during my travels, combined with natural binders I cook with red algae. These colors hold the memory of minerals and flora, while the textures carry the physical trace of their making—imprints from studio floors, or marks made unintentionally as color seeps through layers of canvas or delicate paper. Sometimes I embed wax layers into these surfaces, giving form to the atmospheric residue of a place or moment.
I approach my studio practice as a form of cooking. Just as I mix paints with historical binders, I cook my bioplastic sculptures using local ingredients that carry personal and collective histories. In this ritual-like process, I feel the texture of memory forming. I trace the seeping, fading colors of Oaxacan cempasúchil (marigold) with my hands while sensing the history of malachite—the ancient pigment once used to paint the green eyes of Egyptian figures. My work becomes material memory: a testimony to the stories we hold, release, and transform—a frozen record of constant flux.
한국어
제이리(Jay Lee)는 재료가 서로 다른 시간의 속도와 환경 속에서 기억을 품고 운반하는 방식을 탐구하는 작가이다. 천연 안료, 홍조류 바인더, 유리, 밀랍, 전분 기반 바이오플라스틱 등 다양한 재료를 다루며, 얼어붙는 것과 녹아내리는 것, 부패하는 것 사이의 끊임없는 춤을 작업에 담는다.
바이오플라스틱 조각은 부패하고 지속되는 시간을, 실험 사진은 빛에 의해 각인된 찰나의 순간을, 유리 작업은 숨결의 아카이브로서 공기방울을, 회화는 추출한 안료와 천연 바인더로 대지와 바다의 지도를 그린다.
작업실에서의 실천은 일종의 요리와 같으며, 재료를 섞고 결합하는 의식은 물질적 기억—우리가 품고, 놓아주고, 변형하는 이야기들의 증언—이 된다.
From the Studio
Occasional letters on new work, exhibitions, and the materials that carry memory.
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