Jooen's Portfolio

Biography

Jooen Lee has always been wondering why society considers silence and discretion as imperfection and vulnerability. Most of her creative works are based on experimenting with silence and invisibility. She currently lives in Toulouse where she studies and works as a video editor and 3D artist.

Born in Seoul, South Korea in 1994, Lee was raised in Hanoi, Vietnam from the age of two. She studied cinema at University Paris 10 where she made a documentary short-film about sleep paralysis, Ginger Therapy. She then worked in a post-production studio for a year. After realising the cinema industry was nothing like she had dreamt of, she left Paris to travel across South East Asia. Her unusual journey, subject to many unexpected events, pushed her to do things she would never have done and led her to appreciate imperfection and discomfort. She started to think outside the box.

Growing up, she felt like she was taken from her roots to be repotted in different environments around the world. Like a leaf fallen on a stream, carried to the unknown, she did not belong to any culture and no language belonged to her. She began to be interested in the stability and silence of living beings other than humans.

In 2020, during the first lockdown due to the pandemic, she was confined in Seoul, South Korea, where she started her grass-roots project: experimenting with plants. She wanted to listen to them by using sensors and strange gadgets she had clumsily made. However, her lack of knowledge in digital programming encouraged her to go back to France to pursue her studies in digital creation.

Later that year, she created an interactive installation named Plant in the Shell which took part of her master’s thesis at University Toulouse Jean Jaurès. She used sensors that detect electric activities from a plant and translated them into sound. The installation was broadcast on a live-stream that engaged viewers to take a quiet moment to observe the invisible and listen to the silence. The plant made different sounds as a reaction to the audience's comments on the streaming platform. Lee’s work highlights the notion that we are now living in an urban society where physical interaction is nearly prohibited. Therefore, the plant could be interactive only through a chat screen.

Lee is currently working on a new project entitled Vie in vivo which is in fact a sequel to the previous one. Vie in vivo is an interactive animation about microscopic living beings. By making the invisible visible, her project explores how science and technology have allowed humans to understand the world differently. Thus, microscopic observation is another path for Lee to question human’s physical limits and to reconsider the perception of reality. Despite the challenges of balancing her studies and work, Lee has been meticulously experimenting on invisible life forms. Lee is thrilled to discover what her project could become as she slowly yet incisively expands her passion for art, science and technology.