Untitled — Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn

Untitled — Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn is a 156-print drypoint sequence depicting the major Brooklyn intersection at the entrance to Prospect Park, anchored by the Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial Arch and continually busy with traffic circling the rotary. Drypoint suits the subject: the burr's soft, velvet line catches the diffuse light and motion of an urban plaza in a way that the harder, etched line of intaglio engraving would not. Each frame is pulled from a separately incised plate, then assembled into stop-motion animation, so the static plaza becomes a record of pedestrian and vehicular flow. This is one of the foundational works in Lee's print-animation practice from 2009, parallel to Family Portrait of the same year, and locates her early work explicitly in the Brooklyn neighborhoods she had moved to from Seoul. The choice of a New York traffic plaza—simultaneously a landmark and an unremarkable daily passage—reflects her recurring attention to the rhythms of ordinary urban life rather than to monuments or set-piece views.