Jimin Lee is a Korean-born California-based artist.
For many years, she has focused on themes of mobility, displacement and labor on the personal and social level as seen in traffic, places of transport, or objects that move or are "in transit" -- travel in both the daily and in the migratory sense.
Her research and practice center on the area of photo-based prints. In recent years she investigated and developed a new option and possibility in print media by adopting emerging print strategies in an expanded art context. For example, by integrating the traditional woodcut with laser-cutting and inkjet printing processes, she birthed a new creative formula of her own that blends conventional mediums of print and contemporary digital technology so that they interplay with and reshape each other. But while using digital tools and applications has been a critical part of her image-making, she has continued to use the great hands-on, tactile techniques that belong to the long and storied history of printmaking. She continually experiment and refine techniques and the use of new materials by expanding the esthetics of this ancient art form.
Lee has shown her work internationally in solo exhibitions that have included, among others, Anchor Graphics in Chicago; QCC Art Gallery at the City University of New York; Don Soker Contemporary Art in San Francisco; DoART Gallery/Hyundai Gallery in Seoul, Korea; Shirota Gallery in Tokyo, Japan; AndrewShire Gallery in Los Angeles; Megalo Gallery in Canberra, Australia; Open Studio Gallery in Toronto, Galerie Alain Piroir in Montreal and Artist Proof Gallery in Calgary, Canada; Guanlan Original Printmaking Base in Shenzhen and Chengdu Art Museum in Chengdu, China; Seven Star Gallery in Berlin, Germany.
Notable group exhibitions include Crosscurrents: 8 American Contemporary Printmakers at Il Quadrato di Omega, Rome, Italy; Tradition & Innovation II at Museum Zallerein Halle 6, Essen, Germany; and Graphica Creative 2009 at Jyvaskyla Art Museum, Jyvaskyla, Finland.
Since 1995 Lee has been living in the San Francisco Bay Area and she is a professor of art and heads the print media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA as well as the Contemporary Print Media Research Center.