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, reconfiguring 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 rewritten through sensing, data and computation, 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 modes of thinking that emphasis interdependence, I approach media as a series of overlapping fields—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. When models are trained on the past, they can end up repeating the past—producing forecasts that sound precise yet fail to open the future. In response, I work with computational drift not as a defect to be eliminated, but as a productive condition through which unfamiliar forms and relations can emerge. I do not correct drift; I cultivate it—through slowness, repetition, contamination, reprinting, and the insistence of the hand. 

I often slow down computational speed by re-printing, collaging and hand-marking machine-generated images, insisting on the return of the body to the post-digital surface. I am also concerned with the problem of fragmented memory—especially when memory is reduced to images and information. For me, memory is inseparable from bodies and places; this is why data materialisation is essential to my practice, so that data can be encountered as texture, rhythm and spatial presence rather than as a purely visual representation.
My installations invite viewers to step beyond familiar sensory boundaries and to reflect on art’s role in shaping how we perceive the world. Rather than illustrating a theme, my work stages conditions in which prediction, memory and perception are negotiated in public. 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 ecological and technological terrains in which we now live.

Bio
Dr Jinjoon Lee FRSA (이진준), born in Masan, South Korea, is an educator, 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. Inheriting the lineage of the East Asian literati tradition as an artist-scholar, Lee explores the ontology of the post-digital era and leads international discourse surrounding Creative AI.

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 Center of the Arts Council Korea in 2007, and being selected as a Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2021 artist in the UK, his work has been shown at numerous museums, galleries, and institutions worldwide, 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, Firstsite Museum, South London Gallery 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 in Sangam-dong DMC, Seoul, in the early 2010s. More recently, he has garnered significant attention for Good Morning, Mr. G-Dragon, a space art project based on the iris data of K-pop artist, and Cine-Forest: Awakening Bloom, an open-air media performance held at Bundang Central Park. His works are held in collections internationally such as DIB Bangkok, and he regularly collaborates on architectural and innovation projects that integrate art and technology.

Lee is currently a 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 AI Lab. He is an Affiliate Professor at New York University (NYU), an invited Visiting Fellow at Exeter College, 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. He has been represented by Gallery BB&M in Seoul, where he presented a solo exhibition "Champagne Supernova" in 2025. His research and philosophy were recently featured in the New Year's issue of Bijutsu Techo, Japan’s leading contemporary art magazine.


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