Surreal Installations Photographed in a Tiny Art Studio

The Seoul-based artist JeeYoung Lee makes the most of her small studio, creating and photographing elaborate installations inside of it. Though the space is approximately 200 square feet, Lee transforms the stage with handmade backdrops, props, and sets. She crafts surreal scenes and shoots them as lushly detailed portraits, usually of herself exploring her own imagined places. The resulting photographs are unedited; they don’t need to be, as the tableus are already so rich with imagery. In one picture, the room is filled with vintage wooden furniture and giant pink maple seed pods. In others, the space is defined by mirrored cubes, tiger-striped pipes, oversize Lego pieces, pink tendrils, or 2D keys and crows, to name just a handful of Lee’s theatrical scenes. The photographs have exhibited over the course of six years from 2008 to 2014 at OPIOM Gallery.