Chang-Jin Lee is a Korean-American visual artist who lives in New York City.[1]
Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea,[2] and lives in New York City.[3]
Lee attended Parsons School of Design[4] and earned her BFA from the State University of New York at Purchase.
In 2011, Lee received a fellowship from the Franconia Sculpture Park, for which she created Dear Leader, an inflatable monument of Kim Jung Il. Lee's sculptural art Floating Echo, a transparent inflatable Buddha atop a lotus flower, debuted at the Busan Sea Art Festival in Korea in 2011. The 10-foot-high work was presented at the Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens in 2012, where it floated in the East River,[5] [6] and at the Three River Arts Festival at Point State Park in Pittsburgh the following year.
Lee began researching comfort women in 2007.[7] She traveled to seven Asian countries and interviewed survivors of sexual slavery during World War II as well as a former Imperial Japanese Army soldier. She created a film documentary of the subjects recalling their experiences during the war and their aspirations. Her exhibition Comfort Women Wanted opened at South Korea's Incheon Women Artists' Biennale in 2009.[8] The exhibition's title echoes newspaper advertisements soliciting comfort women during World War II. The exhibition recreates a comfort station. It was later exhibited in Bonn, Boston, Hong Kong, Pittsburgh, and Taipei.[9] [10] Public art billboards from the exhibition were selected for the New York City Department of Transportation's Urban Art Program in 2013.[11]
Lee has received numerous awards, including a New York State Council on the Arts grant, Asian Cultural Council fellowship, an Asian Women Giving Circle award, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fiscal Sponsorship award, a Puffin Foundation grant, a Busan Sea Art Festival Award, and a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Manhattan Community Arts Fund.[12]