KHANA 09 REVIEWS LEE JEONG LOK

I was first drawn to Lee Jeong Lok's work when I saw his "Tree of Life" piece while searching for night photography. I was intrigued at first  and found his work invigorating and refreshing but the more I viewed his collection of this body of work, part of it looked too similar to the last I had looked and began to explore his website. A previous body of work was also pertaining to the "Tree of Life" but was different trees he edited and each had a different feel than the last unlike his newer set of works where it all appears to be the same negative image of a generic tree with lights.

Looking closer at this body of work, the backgrounds vary and may seem different but there is a collective feeling throughout the pieces. It is interesting to see how changing a couple things, whether it be raising exposure level overall or displacing a couple lights and placing them in a different location in the piece, can alter the piece in its entirety and give a different mood. Some photographs even have a slight feeling that they could even pass as darkroom work.

In another collection on his website is a body of work titled "Aquarium" where it is close up shots of varying fish species in aquariums with at the end of the works is self made "faux" aquariums with lures and in the second has a set of credit cards on hooks set on fishing lines. I enjoyed this body of work more so than the previous I looked at because not all of the photos have the same cleanliness to them. By that I mean that some of the photos have a little more grain than the first and some have the focus on the foreground and others the background which blur out and place parts of the important information out of focus.