Joyce Yu-Jean Lee Artist Talk

Today Joyce Yu-Jean Lee came to talk to us about her artwork. She currently teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. She most recent project and exhibit is about internet censorship and it's a project that viewers can interact with virtually. But, she was not always an artist. She was born and raised in Dallas, TX and she comes from a family of Chinese immigrants. Since she was American born Chinese, aspiring to be an artist, or becoming an artist is definitely not the norm. Most Chinese parents want their children to become lawyers or doctors or etc. She went to the University of Pennsylvania for Communications and Psychology and when she graduated she starting working for Ralph Lauren. She quickly found out that she hated working in the fashion industry. She worked this 9-5 job in NYC during the day, but at night she would take classes at the Art Students League of NY. This is how she first got involved with the arts as an "apprentice". She never thought about becoming an artist, but she always enjoyed art and she was even voted most likely to be an artist in high school. After working in New York for 6 years, she applied and got accepted to MICA for graduate school. She applied as a painter, but graduated as a videoartist. 

One of her earlier projects was called Hover.
Click the Link to see Hover: https://www.numberf.com/videos/aacd7323556c4cbf 
Yard of Lunatics by Goya was her inspiration for Hover 
Yard of Lunatics
Goya
and she used a very simple space of her artwork. She hand-drew the background and then she projected images onto her piece using a greenscreen. The piece depicts figures in business attire and they are staring up at a light, which is supposed to resemble a glowing sky. All the figures shown have confused or worried faces and she wanted to capture the idea of how these corporate workers are missing out on more of life. She wanted to create an illusion of a painting, but to also have the viewer reconsider the idea of looking at a painting since on average a person will only look at a painting for 3-8 seconds, which clearly is not a lot of time spent appreciating the artwork for what it is.

Because of Joyce's Chinese background, she incorporated this into some of her pieces. One earlier piece that she did tried to portray different cultures. It portrayed Western culture versus Eastern culture. For Western culture she had movie-goers being lulled by the static of pop culture, whereas Eastern culture were 2 people sitting on a stoop and they are supposed to be observing us Westerners. 

A more recent piece that she constructed that also incorporated her Asian American culture was her Firewall Internet Cafe. She developed a project which was supposed to mimic an internet cafe in Chinatown, NYC. The project essentially allowed the user to go to one of the computer and search a word. It would search the word they typed in Google, the United States' most popular search engine and Baidu, China's most popular search engine. The viewer/user would only be able to search images only, and she purposely did this because images are universal. She wanted this project to show China's censorship and how it compares the US's accessibility to so much more information. 

Personally I really enjoyed seeing her work and I really liked that she focused some of her artwork on her heritage. I can definitely relate and understand some of the things she was trying to portray because I'm also an Asian American myself. I think my favorite piece that she showed us was the Firewall Internet Cafe, because I remember when I was in seventh grade I did a project on censorship in China and it just brought back a lot of memories to the research I did back then. 


Inside of the Internet Cafe
Outside of the Internet Cafe

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