“Niigata”（2024） Photo: Hwajin Lee
“Niigata”（2024） Photo: Hwajin Lee
“Niigata”（2024） Photo: Hwajin Lee
“Niigata”was written by Si-jong Kim (born 1929), a poet who came to Japan as a refugee the time of the Jeju April 3 Incident (the Jeju Uprising). “Niigata” is ingrained with the question of how to live with the division of Korea while residing in Japan. By reworking this poem as a photographic work from her own perspective as someone who came to Japan from a different generation and with a different background to Kim, Lee attempts to generate multiple roots and diffuse reflections in an amplification of the lives and times of others, both close and distant.
Research cooperation: Honoka Sato, Mari Morisawa, Takayo Fujiishi, Ayumi Hara
Editorial cooperation: Ayumi Hara
Design: Tomoyuki Yanagawa
Installation: Mikako Otsuka
With the cooperation of: Natsumi Aoyagi
Special acknowledgements: Si-jong Kim, Soon-hee Kang
Hwajin Lee
Photographer, filmmaker and artist. Born in Tokyo in 1991, Lee lived in Seoul, South Korea from the age of four to seven and is now Tokyo-based. From the starting point of her origins as an immigrant, Lee creates works exploring her roots. With a focus on situations occurring in the relationship between people and the land, her works deal with the Korean Peninsula and East Asia, expressing the complexity and richness of historical twists and turns.
As well as representing the correlation between the self and society – something which is reconstructed in the process of creation – her work allows the viewer to make polysemic interpretations through the structuring of multiple intersecting events within a single piece.
ｔheca（honkbooks）, Shinjuku City, Tokyo
