Timothy Hyunsoo Lee: gwisin baljaguk (ghost prints)

This exhibition explores the experience of existing between cultures, never fully here nor there. Drawing from his life as a queer immigrant who arrived in New York City as an undocumented child, Lee examines how gestures of invisibility and hypervisibility function as survival strategies for immigrant communities navigating layered identities within hostile environments.
Lee's photosensitive cyanotype processes mirror the lexicon of immigration, with "exposure" functioning as a metaphor for assimilation. Through overexposure, images become ghostly, haunting the spaces they inhabit—much like his experience of being "like a ghost between two cultures, wandering aimlessly through both and belonging to neither." For him, abstraction is both visual language and lived condition, a method of camouflage enabling movement between identities.
Central to the exhibition is the artist’s investigation of mugwort, a plant species revered in Korean culture yet labeled invasive in the United States. Mugwort's dual status becomes a potent metaphor for the immigrant experience: thriving in unwelcoming ecosystems, present but unseen, vital yet unwanted. Lee is drawn to how these "undesirable" plants exist alongside the margins—in sidewalk cracks, at curb edges, around abandoned lots—much like the immigrant communities he grew up in. Like the complex root systems through which invasive species propagate beneath the surface, diasporic communities form networks of mutual aid that sustain migration across generations and beyond biological ties. The use of gold, often an offering in Asian cultures, simultaneously evokes notions of wealth and the American dream: shiny on the outside, concealing complex realities beneath.
The exhibition brings together works that dance flawlessly between figuration and abstraction in the same way that the artist has grown accustomed to “code-switch” to survive both as an immigrant and as a queer man, perpetually switching between masks of existence.