Road Trip

Road Trip selects 8 drypoint prints from a 28-print set, the larger sequence functioning as master frames for a stop-motion animation of vehicular travel. Drypoint—an intaglio process in which a sharp needle scratches directly into the plate, raising a metal burr that catches ink—produces the soft, fuzzy line characteristic of Lee's frames; that burr also wears with each pass through the press, so each print in a sequence carries a slightly different tonal register, an unintended record of the plate's own erosion. Travel is a recurring frame in Lee's practice: as a Korean-born artist working in New York, the act of moving between places is both biographical fact and structural premise. By breaking continuous movement into discrete printed frames and then reassembling them into animation, she makes the medium itself enact the immigrant condition of being repeatedly in transit. The 28-print scale here is modest compared with her later animations, which run into the hundreds of frames.