JINJOON LEE - Green Room Garden

Commissioned by Gyeongnam Art Museum

at On Life, Gyeongnam Art Museum, Changwon, Korea, 8 APR - 26 JUN, 2022

Jinjoon Lee researches on producing work on “liminoid experience” using new technologies. He seeks to explore the relationship between nature and a new substance called artificiality through his work. In the face of various signs of environmental disaster, how can nature and artificial beings’ interaction and coexistence be achieved? Lee encourages us to break down and redefine the structure of our consciousness by posing a significant question on our limited gaze and social phenomena.

Green Room Garden is Lee’s new work commissioned by Gyeongnam Art Museum for this exhibition. It is deeply meaningful that it is exhibited in a space that holistically integrates all his research fields. The virtuality-reality boundary is already gone, guiding our tempo-spatial experience to another level. The audience would be able to experience the boundary as if to step on a virtual place through the wall painting constituting an artificial garden filled up with the green light and a video of the manufactured nature made of AR and AI technologies. Upon leaving the garden, our visual experience being accustomed to the green light would leave us with visually residual images in red as if being soaked in water, and enable us to encounter a different scenery from when we first stepped into it.

"Green is considered the color of nature.
It reminds us of natural landscapes full of greenery.
At the same time, it's a color that's known to be psychologically calming.
For this reason, the word “green room” also refers to the waiting room of actors before a performance.
It's said that they used green wallpaper to help actors relax.
What's interesting is that these green rooms metaphorize the liminal space between the stage and offstage.
The wallpaper patterns often borrow from plants, flowers, and birds.
The idea is to create a garden-like liminal space.
This emotional space, which relieves the inner tension of the performers preparing backstage, represents the physical and emotional boundary between the audience and the performers, and becomes a link between the stage as seen by the audience and the space experienced by the performers.
The large projected images on the walls and the seemingly abandoned and randomly reconfigured sculptures on the floor hint at this psychological space behind the raw stage.
Filled with light and sound, this synaesthetic liminal space reveals an atmosphere of subtle tension through the interplay between the natural and the artificial, the virtual and the real."

- From the Artist note for Green Room Garden by Jinjoon Lee