Jinwoo Hwon Lee 이훤 - Home is Everywhere and Often Nowhere
Jinwoo Hwon Lee 이훤 is a visual artist and poet whose work uses literary and visual languages to narrate the experiences and emotions between separation, disjointment and isolation. His latest series 집은 어디에나 있고 자주 아무 데도 없다 Home Is Everywhere and Often Nowhere (2019-ongoing) surveys different forms of placelessness experienced through migration. As his series progressed, however, he realized that many of us, not just immigrants, experience a transient sense of home. Eventually, the idea of home moved from what Jinwoo cites as “a physical place we reside with loved ones” to “the state of being abled without consequences.”
Photographic excerpts and the second half of Jinwoo’s interview are featured in our latest print issue: Home.
words by Jinwoo
Certain images in this series speak of the presence and ephemerality of home simultaneously. The leaves wrapped around the trees are a realistic and reassuring form of home; yet, it also makes the landscape almost fantastical, far from reality. Other images converse with each other. I wanted the images in this series to subtly intertwine. Lights, for example, show how fundamentally needed the seemingly mundane sense of home is. There are facets of dislocation throughout–closed rooms full of accessible possibilities. Yet, the gaze in this series is never focused for too long, it continues to move–inside and out between an outspoken testimony and a metaphor. I photograph the crevices while at home, but acknowledge that visibility is not a fixed barometer of home. The ever-renewing sight of home and our distance from it will keep transforming itself into something else; the only way to notice it is to continually responding to them.
