Jiyoun Lee-Lodge 지연 이-랏지
Waterman-You and I, 2022
Jiyoun Lee-Lodge is a Korean-born artist based in Salt Lake City, Utah, working across painting, drawing, installation, and public art. Her visual language—shaped by training in fine arts and professional experience in animation—explores identity, transformation, and psychological displacement.
She earned her BFA from Chung-Ang University in Seoul and her MFA from Brooklyn College (CUNY), and lived in New York for over a decade before relocating to Utah. Her work has been presented at institutions such as the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA), Modern West Fine Art, Southern Utah Museum of Art, and Gallery Korea, among others.
Lee-Lodge has received residencies and fellowships from UMOCA, Modern West, the Manhattan Graphics Center, and Brooklyn College. Her public artworks include The Arrival, a mural for PS 144Q in Queens, New York, and The Crossing, a permanent sculpture at Salt Lake City’s 600 South TRAX Station.
She earned her BFA from Chung-Ang University in Seoul and her MFA from Brooklyn College (CUNY), and lived in New York for over a decade before relocating to Utah. Her work has been presented at institutions such as the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA), Modern West Fine Art, Southern Utah Museum of Art, and Gallery Korea, among others.
Lee-Lodge has received residencies and fellowships from UMOCA, Modern West, the Manhattan Graphics Center, and Brooklyn College. Her public artworks include The Arrival, a mural for PS 144Q in Queens, New York, and The Crossing, a permanent sculpture at Salt Lake City’s 600 South TRAX Station.
My work explores the instability of identity in a world where cultural belonging, digital mediation, and personal memory constantly shift and collide. I approach portraiture not to capture fixed likeness, but to question how the self is constructed, disassembled, or multiplied across time, place, and screen.
As a Korean-born artist living in Utah—after over a decade in New York—I often filter these questions through the lens of migration, hybridity, and adaptation. I draw from both personal experience and collective imagery to reflect the emotional charge of transition: the struggle to locate oneself in unfamiliar landscapes, both external and internal.
Since 2018, my ongoing Waterman series has acted as an avatar of dislocation. These fluid, often fragmented figures navigate surreal spaces that echo the Utah desert and domestic interiors—spaces rendered with fragile, dissolving patterns. Waterman is a body in flux, caught between mimicry and resistance, between longing and estrangement.
In Unguarded Portraits, I turn my attention to others, capturing people in intimate states of rest and presence. These works push against performance, offering viewers a moment of quiet recognition—portraits that refuse spectacle in favor of sincerity.
My latest project, Is this a real ice cream?, explores how painting—historically a medium of belief, reflection, and documentation—is challenged by digital simulation. I paint both real and AI-generated photographs of boys eating ice cream, using my own hand and perception to interrogate what I see. The act of translating these images into paint becomes a way to question authenticity, perception, and my own emotional response. In a time when "seeing is believing" no longer holds steady, I ask: how do I absorb, trust, or reject the images the world presents to me?
Across media, my practice invites viewers to sit with uncertainty—and to consider how identity, connection, and presence are made and unmade through images.
As a Korean-born artist living in Utah—after over a decade in New York—I often filter these questions through the lens of migration, hybridity, and adaptation. I draw from both personal experience and collective imagery to reflect the emotional charge of transition: the struggle to locate oneself in unfamiliar landscapes, both external and internal.
Since 2018, my ongoing Waterman series has acted as an avatar of dislocation. These fluid, often fragmented figures navigate surreal spaces that echo the Utah desert and domestic interiors—spaces rendered with fragile, dissolving patterns. Waterman is a body in flux, caught between mimicry and resistance, between longing and estrangement.
In Unguarded Portraits, I turn my attention to others, capturing people in intimate states of rest and presence. These works push against performance, offering viewers a moment of quiet recognition—portraits that refuse spectacle in favor of sincerity.
My latest project, Is this a real ice cream?, explores how painting—historically a medium of belief, reflection, and documentation—is challenged by digital simulation. I paint both real and AI-generated photographs of boys eating ice cream, using my own hand and perception to interrogate what I see. The act of translating these images into paint becomes a way to question authenticity, perception, and my own emotional response. In a time when "seeing is believing" no longer holds steady, I ask: how do I absorb, trust, or reject the images the world presents to me?
Across media, my practice invites viewers to sit with uncertainty—and to consider how identity, connection, and presence are made and unmade through images.
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