Jun Lee
Jun Lee
Jun Lee (Falls Church, VA) is a printmaker who works in large format woodcut utilizing animals as metaphors to convey competition in our daily lives. She is currently the Printmaking Artist in Residence at the Lee Arts Center in Arlington, VA and she teaches relief printmaking at Montgomery College Takoma Park/Silver Spring, MD. Her work was purchased for 2019 Montgomery County Contemporary Works on Paper Artwork, Public Art Collection of the Montgomery County Public Art Trust by Montgomery County Public Art Trust (Silver Spring, MD). Lee was awarded 2020 & 2019 DC Art Bank grant by the Government of DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities (Washington, DC, 2019), and was one of the semifinalists for the 2018 Sondheim Artscape Prize (Baltimore, MD). She was awarded the Artist in Residency from Montgomery College Takoma Park/Silver Spring in Fall Semester 2018, the Denbo Fellowship from Pyramid Atlantic Art Center (Hyattsville, MD) in 2017, and also completed winter residencies at Penland School of Crafts (Penland, NC) in 2017 through 2020.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including: Jewett Arts Center at Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA, 2019), The Little Gallery (Omaha, NE, 2019), Alper Initiative for Washington Art at the American University Museum (Washington, DC, 2019), University of Maryland Global Campus, Adelphi, MD (Adelphi, MD, 2019 & 2016), Highpoint Center for Printmaking (Minneapolis, MN, 2018), Decker and Meyerhoff galleries, Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD, 2018), Artists and Makers Studios (Rockville, MD, 2018), K Space Contemporary (Corpus Christi, TX, 2017), Purdue University Galleries (West Lafayette, IN, 2017), Waverly Street Gallery (Bethesda, MD, 2016), Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery (Washington, DC, 2015), Insa Art Center (Seoul, South Korea, 2014), Daimler Financial Services Atrium (Berlin, Germany, 2007). Lee attended the Minneapolis College of Art & Design where she earned a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Illustration in 2002, and a Post Baccalaureate in Printmaking in 2004. In 2007, She received her Masters of Fine Arts in Print Media from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI.
This series of woodcuts attempts to evoke the different moments of our competitive lives; pieces that express the spectrum of competition from hiding away to preparing for a fight. The reality is that all life is competition and we create barriers in our minds that allow us to think we have a space we can step into where the competition stops. That constructed space allows us to regroup and enter the next fight toward our goal. Every attempt might not succeed or look glorious, but every victory is built upon the foundation of loss, suffering, effort, and sacrifice. The ability to be successful is not dependent on the number of triumphs that you have, but rather your willingness to get up and continue the struggle after a defeat.
My work uses animals as a metaphor of desire and fear in this competitive thing called life; a rooster symbolizes a winner or a loser, but one that can anticipate the demands of the
