NIM: a fixed room, shifting light

 

The project at the heart of the exhibition, NIM, was photographed over approximately one year after Lee returned to New York toward the end of the pandemic. For that year he invited different people into the same small room and charted how natural light, entering through a small window in the door, altered each encounter. The room and its basic spatial conditions remained constant; the light did not. Morning and afternoon, cloud and sun, winter and summer all left distinct traces on otherwise identical settings.

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By limiting variables, Lee made the uncontrolled elements louder. Small adjustments, such as how a subject curved a shoulder, the distance from the wall, the tilt of a head, or the texture of a sweater, could swing an image from stillness to tension. The decisions that remained belonged not to production designers but to the hour, the weather, and the unrepeatable circumstances of a single moment.

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From ZINE to WALL 

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​In 2025 Lee was selected as an Emerging Artist by Dashwood Books, an acknowledgment that led to the publication of NIM as a photo zine. The zine condensed roughly a year of encounters into a fixed sequence, transforming discrete portraits into a rhythm of images and pauses. Sequencing in the book made relationships explicit: one image could interrupt, another could echo, and a quiet frame could become a fulcrum between portraits. 

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Sequencing, scale and the viewer’s movement

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Moving the project from a book to the gallery altered how relationships between images are made. A publication fixes an order, a wall invites the viewer to compose sequences through proximity, stepping back, and moving across the room. At Maison Mono Lee placed images so that shadows, gestures, and color could converse across distance: a face in one frame might reflect in the geometry of another, a void could function as a deliberate pause. The viewer’s movement completes the work.