“Mustard Seed: Moving Mountains” Installation view at The Reference ©The ReferenceThe Reference is pleased to present “Mustard Seed: Moving Mountains,” a solo exhibition by OPEN PT 2022 Best Portfolio winner Ye-eun Lee, on view through January 28. OPEN PT is an emerging artist support program created as part of The Reference’s annual critique of contemporary photographic media. The winner of the program receives space and exhibition opportunities for the following year, and in 2023, the program will be hosted by Ye-eun Lee.
Through her photography, She captures the lives of individuals engaged in labor in contemporary society, as well as social phenomena and people’s stories. The artist highlights the repetitive and exhausting time spent in labor-filled daily life and the reality that even if you think there is something wrong with the system, you have no alternative but to do your job on time. She describes her experience in this environment as ‘reckless,’ but she does not display or pessimistically portray the individual who survives in a solid organization and system.
The artist’s mindset is an expression of her will to believe that ‘mountains can be moved with faith as small as a mustard seed,’ as the exhibition title suggests, and the beginning of a story that asks everyone whose daily lives are filled with labor to persevere, affirm, and move together. The exhibition features representative works of the artist, including three new works.
Ye-eun Lee graduated from Sangmyung University’s Department of Photography and Visual Media in 2019 and majored in fine art photography at Chung-Ang University’s Graduate School of General Studies in 2021. She held a solo exhibition “227 People” (2022) at BMW Photo Space and has participated in numerous group exhibitions at the Total Museum of Art, SeMA Warehouse, and the Embassy of Switzerland in Korea, and was selected as an Outstanding Artist in the Portfolio Review at the 7th Daegu Photo Biennale in 2018.
