Kyungmin Kate Lee

For artist Kyungmin Kate Lee, photography has always been a vital window to communicate with the world and a medium for recording everyday emotions that words fail to capture. Born and raised in South Korea before settling in Toronto, Canada, she has boldly stepped beyond the conventional perception of photography as a static, fixed image. Grounded in the photographic medium, she integrates processes of materiality and time to explore identity, memory, and embodied perception. What captures the attention of both Canadian and Korean art scenes is her ingenious use of media and her interdisciplinary approach. By integrating traditional photographic techniques alongside cyanotypes, tactile materials, sculptural structures, and braille as language, she has forged a distinctive artistic realm that collapses the boundaries between two- and three-dimensional, digital and analog, visual and tactile.

While her work originates from photographic images, it is far from a mere static record of landscapes. In her Playground series, for instance, she utilizes complex processes such as digital infrared imaging and multiple exposures. As a result, familiar playgrounds and winter forests transform into dreamlike, hallucinatory landscapes that oscillate between reality, memory, and imagination. In a snow-covered, overcast landscape, visual boundaries blur, creating an atmospheric suspension where form hovers between presence and absence—an evocative metaphor for the inherent uncertainty of human memory and perception. Here, color operates not as mere representation, but as a mechanism that reveals emotion and structure. Rippling neon tones evoke latent inner possibilities, while a muted gray foundation anchors the weight of constraints and reality, tracing a trajectory of healing and growth within this creative tension.