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PKM gallery to open Lee Jung-jin exhibition 'Unseen/Thing' Wednesday

Published: 14 Apr. 2026, 15:58 Updated: 14 Apr. 2026, 18:17

LIM JEONG-WON
[email protected]

Works by photographer Lee Jung-jin are on display at the PKM Gallery in Jongno District, central Seoul, in this image provided by the gallery. [PKM GALLERY]

A new exhibition on the works of world-renown photographer Lee Jung-jin, titled “Unseen/Thing,” opens from Wednesday at the PKM Gallery in Jongno District, central Seoul.

The first solo exhibition of Lee's in six years, the new two-part exhibition pairs Lee’s latest Iceland series, a collection of photographs taken on a trip to Iceland, with rare analog works from the early 2000s, offering a compact view of a practice that has long pushed photography beyond documentation and toward contemplation.

“Iceland had been on my mind for years, but I hesitated because the country had already been so widely photographed,” said Lee during a press conference at the PKM Gallery on Tuesday. “That hesitation was part of the reason the work took so long to happen. When I finally made the trip in 2024, I found not the still, stripped-down vastness I associated with the desert, where I worked for a long time, but something far more unstable and forceful.”

“The desert had always felt static and silent to me, almost like a blank wasteland, while Iceland came at me more roughly,” Lee said. “The weather shifted constantly, with wind, waves, snow and light changing by the minute. At times, the force of nature felt almost frightening.”

That sense of being unsettled made its way directly into the new photographs presented at the PKM Gallery, according to Lee.

Works by photographer Lee Jung-jin are on display at the PKM Gallery in Jongno District, central Seoul, in this image provided by the gallery [PKM GALLERY]

The title “Unseen” also reflects that approach. Lee did not want to present the work as simply “Iceland,” just as earlier projects of hers had often avoided literal place names. What interested Lee was not the landscape as a fixed subject, but the point where it collided with her own energy and state of mind.

“I did not photograph a glacier as a glacier, in the same way one does not look at a spoon only as a spoon,” Lee said. “The object, for me, matters less than the encounter.”

Lee, born in 1961, studied ceramics in university and started photography through documentary practice. Her work has been featured at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The exhibition runs from Wednesday to May 23 across both PKM Gallery and PKM+, with “Unseen” (2024) presented in Korea for the first time and “Thing” (2003–2007) revisiting intimate still lifes made through analog processes including hanji (traditional Korean paper) printing.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]