Beyond the JPEG with Sam Kyung Lee
In summer | By: Kyung, Miguel, and Wei | Year: 2019-20
By Lana Nauphal
Looking at Sam Kyung Lee’s photographs, you might be overcome with a peculiar feeling: that you are somewhere you shouldn’t be, catching a secret glimpse of someone else’s life unfolding before your eyes, in all its rawness of emotion. Lovers embrace; a mother sits alone in the dark; siblings do the dishes. In their disconcerting intimacy, Kyung’s photographs work like portals, inviting you into their own particular worlds—worlds of connection, yes, but also of tension. There is a story being told with each image, and each story hints at the artist’s deepening exploration of identity and community, and of identity within community.
들려줘 | By: Kyung, 엄마, Gogo, and Ame | Year: 2019
“In many ways,” Kyung says, “the photograph is born before the actual JPEG, before the actual image; it is a way of visualizing and seeing the world.” Kyung’s undeniable connection to photography is the end result of a journey that was molded by the different phases of their life. Growing up, they were naturally drawn to the visual arts, drawing and taking pictures for fun—“but on auto,” Kyung laughs. It was only when they started working as a freelance commercial photographer in college, at Georgetown University, that a shift occurred in their creative impulse. Having been commissioned to shoot college parties, weddings, and social media content—“wealthy urbanites just wanting me to help mythologize them,” they quip—Kyung began to question the heteronormative, patriarchal, and capitalistic narratives they felt they were reinforcing through their work. Subsequently, Kyung gained a stronger grasp on the artistic agency they wanted to command as a queer non-binary person of color, and set out to pursue their art more meaningfully as a vocation. “I just realized that there was a way in which I was going to move about the world now that was going to be fundamentally different,” they recall.
Folded | By: Kyung, Shawn, Tae, and M. | On the photo experience, from Tae: ... Of trying to print a double sided page ... to realize that one edge or another is always a millimeter or two off, or an edge, having run off the page, has opened a floodgate of white space. | Year: 2019
For the most part, Kyung likes to work retrospectively. They prefer to enter a shoot without expectations, and let themselves be guided by the encounter; then, after taking time to sit with the images, they will piece them together in post-production, highlighting unexpected moments of synergy. They oftentimes feel compelled to pair pictures together for the same reason they love poetry: because, Kyung explains, “the viewer, just like a reader, is invited to draw their own connections, their own meanings, that are less didactic, and better at articulating tensions.” The tensions Kyung explores revolve around themes of personal intimacy and collective memory, and center the difficulties of navigating tradition, family, and land for queer non-Black people of color.
“한국같아” | By: Kyung and Yeseo | Caption: on Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo), Peoria, Bodéwadmiakiwen (Potawatomi), Miami, and Očeti Šakówiŋ (Sioux) land | Year: 2020
With their most recent series—which will spotlight queer East Asians of the American diaspora, by pairing and contrasting archival and contemporary images—Kyung is putting their values into action, having tapped into an intensified desire for intentionality during the pandemic. Indeed the hardships of this past year have prompted Kyung, a queer Korean themselves, to question their own selfhood, and to seek out community in new and emerging ways. This project is still a work in progress for Kyung, as it will rely heavily on the collaborative process with its participants, to whom Kyung wants to purposefully extend total agency and control. “When you encounter loss and death on a large scale, you recognize things that matter,” Kyung concludes. “It took a protracted crisis for me to realize that there was something unresolved that I wanted to explore with others. And I'm not looking for resolution; I'm just looking for all that comes with being with another person.”
Kyung is currently enrolled in the MFA Photography program at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. You can see more of Kyung’s work here, and here, as well as on their Instagram.
