He lives and works 
at Nowhere in Somewhere
I am Jinjoon Lee, a media artist, creative director and Data Gardenist devoted to exploring the nebulous intersections of art, technology and human consciousness. My work seeks to trigger sensory and transcendental experiences, deliberately blurring the boundaries between natural and human-engineered realities so that viewers are prompted to embark on introspective journeys into the depths of their own minds.

One phenomenon that has left a profound imprint on my practice is synaesthesia. Its ability to exceed the limits of language and conventional communication has long been a source of inspiration. My installations and performances heighten perceptual awareness through carefully tuned visual and auditory cues, morphing spatial and temporal dimensions into layered experiences. Recognising that our individual realities are sculpted by personal history, cultural lineage and the singular narratives of our societies, I often work in an autoethnographic mode, interweaving anthropological research with personal introspection. This allows me to continually return to the liminal and liminoid spaces that have shaped my own life, and to translate those thresholds into artistic expression.

As someone born in Korea—a country transformed by rapid modernisation and globalisation—and having spent decades living and working between Japan and the United Kingdom, I understand myself as moving through multiple cultural and technological climates at once. My artistic journey has therefore become a quest to expand the perceptual boundaries of the physical self, asking how bodies, memories and landscapes can be re-written by data, and how they resist.

I describe myself as a Data Gardenist because I treat data not merely as information to be processed, but as a set of conditions to be interpreted, cultivated and harvested. Rather than adopting a classical cybernetic model of control and feedback, I propose what I call “gardenetics”: a shift from engineering closed systems to tending open gardens of relations. Drawing on East Asian garden aesthetics and holistic cosmologies of qi, I approach media as a series of overlapping fields—of climate, bodies, images, sounds and algorithms—in which perception and meaning are continuously renegotiated.

In this sense I see AI not as an autonomous agent or a replacement for human creativity, but as a critical tool that exposes the epistemological crisis of the data age. I often slow down algorithmic speed by re-printing, collaging and hand-marking machine-generated images, insisting on the return of the body to the post-digital surface. My installations invite viewers to step beyond familiar sensory boundaries and to reflect on art’s role in shaping how we perceive the world, strengthening our relationship with the spaces we inhabit and advocating a worldview grounded in ecological integration.

As we navigate a complex future saturated with AI, VR and yet-to-emerge technologies, my aspiration is that this practice of data gardening can open spaces for introspection, transformation and a quiet form of transcendence—encouraging more mindful responses to the intricate ecological terrains in which we now find ourselves.

Bio
Dr Jinjoon Lee FRSA (이진준), born in Masan, South Korea, is an educator, new media artist, speculative designer and creative director whose work explores liminoid experiences of utopian and post-utopian space through advanced technologies. He specialises in creating environments that address synaesthetic perception and in directing interdisciplinary performances that bring together sound, image, architecture and computation.

After graduating from the Business School at Seoul National University in 2001, Lee earned his BFA (2005) and MFA (2009) from the same university’s College of Fine Arts. He subsequently completed an MA in Moving Image and Design Interaction at the Royal College of Art in London (2017), and a Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art, St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford (2020). His doctoral thesis, Empty Garden: A Liminoid Journey to Nowhere in Somewhere, took the form of a ten-metre-long scroll that interweaves East Asian garden aesthetics with existential philosophy, poetry and autoethnographic research, proposing a new theoretical perspective on liminal spaces.

Since his debut solo exhibition at the ARKO Art Centre of the Arts Council Korea in 2007, Lee has exhibited widely at institutions including the Seoul Museum of Art, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, the India International Centre, the National Gallery in Prague, the National Gallery of Bulgaria, the Royal College of Art, the Royal College of Music, and the Korean Cultural Centre UK in London. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and a full Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors (MRSS), he is perhaps best known for the large-scale public media sculpture They (2010), permanently installed at Digital Media City in Seoul. His works are held in collections internationally, and he regularly collaborates on architectural and innovation projects that integrate art and technology.

Lee is currently an Associate Professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), where he also serves as Director of the Art & Technology Center and leads the TX Creative Media Lab. He is an Affiliate Professor at New York University (NYU), a Supernumerary Visiting Fellow at Exeter College, University of Oxford, and has previously been a Visiting Scholar at St John’s College, Oxford, and a Visiting Researcher at Tokyo University of the Arts. His research explores data-driven art and design, sound art, and XR-based “media symphonies”, utilising technologies such as AI, VR, EEG and satellite communication to build complex environmental and urban “data gardens”.

In 2023 Lee was invited as a guest artist to the Hertz Lab at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Germany, supported by a grant from the German Federal Cultural Foundation, and in 2024 he received a full fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center in the United States for sound-based creative research. Since 2025 he has been represented by Gallery BB&M in Seoul, where he presented a solo exhibition of post-digital works that further develop his concept of data gardening and gardenetics in the context of a rapidly evolving AI culture.



For an up-to-date CV and more information, please e-mail.