Salts of the earth: The balancing sculptures of Su Ji Lee

Ground Plan, 2022

Impressed by the principle of plate tectonics, the South Korean artist wields on a regular basis objects in her elegant towers, creating quiet, weightless photographs

A pyramid of taking part in playing cards; a stack of desk chairs; cutlery, balloons and tree branches. The objects and sculptural kinds that seem all through South Korean photographer Su Ji Lee’s challenge Factor Tectonics appear disparate at first. However all of them are, actually, linked. They’re acquainted but symbolic gadgets from our each day lives that symbolize wider metaphysical theories and phenomena, appearing as accessible visible metaphors for the legal guidelines of nature and being.

“The challenge title is impressed by the principle of plate tectonics, whereby the Earth’s outer shell is split into a number of large plates gliding over the Earth’s mantle,” she says. “The dichotomy between these large plates we stand on and the frequent crockery upon which we put our meals was very humorous to me.” This led to a collection of visible enquiries, with every picture reinterpreting “the ontological worth of the minute beings we frequently confer with as ‘issues.’”

“Isn’t it weird that I’m sitting in a room with 4 partitions and a ceiling when the universe is exponentially increasing at this very second?”

An instance of that is salt: “Salt is one of the most typical family condiments, we devour it every single day, but we don’t cherish it as a prized possession.” In a picture titled Salt Mimesis, Lee makes an attempt to quantify the bodily and subjective properties of the condiment. She creates a kind of scientific chart, full with black-and-white photographs of salt piles and a guidelines of properties, as if taken from a textbook. Then there’s a picture of a dinner plate, spinning by way of the air, fairly actually showing as a ‘flying saucer’ – changing into a factor of surprise in an in any other case empty night time sky.

Many of the scenes Lee creates may be described as non permanent sculptures as a result of, she says, “all of the constructions in my photographs exist solely to be recorded on the flat emulsion of {a photograph} after which destroyed and not using a hint”. The images turn into “a chunk of proof” of a second of manipulated actuality. That is the case in the picture For Being a Tree (2021), through which Lee reconstructs the kind of a tree out of discarded branches. “Whereas the branches are held along with glue and string to kind the picture of a tree, it’s in the end a futile imitation,” she says.

Taking pictures the majority of her photographs on medium format movie, Lee works in each color and black-and-white, selecting intuitively as she goes. For every new picture, she constructs her scene in entrance of the camera after which, for some of them, asks a pal to step into the body – not a lot as a personality, extra as a default human presence to activate the scene.

“Isn’t it weird that I’m sitting in a room with 4 partitions and a ceiling when the universe is exponentially increasing at this very second?” muses Lee, including that, in the finish, re-evaluating on a regular basis objects by way of her experiments has turn into like “a particular visible strategy to index time”. The challenge will go on so long as she stays curious. “I need to additional dissect this world into my very own items of measure,” she says, “with each humour and a way of weightlessness.”