Claire Sunho Lee: Tell Me What I’m Remembering
December 28th, 2022
By Rachel Kubrick @rachelkubrick
At the entrance of a corporate, unassuming office building at the far end of the City of London, Korean photographer Claire Sunho Lee meets me with take away coffee in hand. It is not the kind of space one typically expects a community of artists to inhabit, but it is where Claire has found a home for her digital photographic practice.
This building is in fact one of arts organisation V.O Curations’ two studio spaces across London. V.O Curations takes over several floors, each filled to the brim with shared and solo studios. Claire lets me into her studio, a repurposed office she shares with two other photographers.
She tells me that she has only been in this space for two months, as the studio moved progressively eastward from locations in St. James and Angel, and now Tower Hill. Fortunately, Claire is used to a peripatetic lifestyle. She grew up between Canada and Seoul, taking her first class in photography there in 2012 to fill a creative urge. A year later, she moved to Manhattan to study for a BFA in Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Blood Test, 2021
Next to her desk, where she spends her time researching, retouching, and writing, is a bookcase replete with exhibition catalogues and photography books that she collected during and since her time in New York. She tenderly pulls out a Japanese monograph, Domestic Scandals (2005) by Takashi Yasumura, featuring polished photographs of sparse still lives within colourful interiors.
Yasumura’s influence is clear in Claire’s work from her New York years. In Domestic Calculus (2016 - 2019), for example, everyday objects are positioned against monochrome backgrounds. Carefully composed so that they appear to float in space, Claire’s photographs are elegant yet uncanny.
Domestic Calculus #6, 2018
Domestic Calculus #5, 2018
With this series, she began her interrogation into how we understand reality, and how fragile these perceptions may be, a concept she explores more intimately in her latest work. Claire explains, “My general practice has to do with suggesting different perspectives to looking at the familiar. Either that’s everyday life or something that has been thought of as your normal.”
When she decided to continue her studies, Claire craved a new perspective. She relocated to London in 2019 to pursue an MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art. Despite graduating in the midst of the pandemic, Claire has remained as dedicated to her practice as ever, continuing to work on her multimedia project Tell Me What I’m Remembering (2021 - ongoing), first exhibited at the 2021 group show After the High Tide at Cromwell Place.
Life-and-Death, 2022
Heavily researched yet highly personal, Tell Me What I’m Remembering is a retrospective visualisation of Claire’s battle with childhood leukaemia. But there’s a catch- I can’t hide my shock when Claire tells me that she only learned of her former cancer when a cousin unknowingly mentioned it in 2016.
Suddenly, early memories of bruises on her arms and doctor’s appointments took on new meaning. In her studio I get to see Bruise 1 (2021) up close, in which pink, discoloured flesh fills its frame like a desert landscape. “It’s about flashbacks of memories I’ve had growing up,” she says. “I’ve always wondered why they’re quite medical. It would just be a frozen moment I wouldn’t have any context of before or after, and I’ve lived with that my entire life.”
Bruise 1, 2021
Fallen Hair, 2021
There is a certain quiet to the images, almost minimalist in their restraint. Yet each photograph is loaded with significance. In Fallen Hair (2021), a topography of lost strands alludes to flashbacks formerly imagined to be haircuts. Medicine (2021) recalls hours waiting in the hospital as a toddler, naively playing with medicine cups and blood red medications. The story becomes more complex, as Claire elaborates that her parents kept her diagnosis a secret even as health check ups continued into adulthood, and remain unaware of her revelation.
“What will these memories be like in the future? What will it mean to me in the future?”
Medicine, 2021
Sonogram Room, 2021
Representing these moments in photographic form allows her to reckon with and contextualise her past, while investigating how humans perceive their past experiences and emotions more generally. Claire's ultimate goal is to make such memories “sustainable”. She explains, “I need to live with these memories and this trauma. I need to move forward with it, but how do I do that? What will these memories be like in the future? What will it mean to me in the future?”
Her next move is to expand Tell Me What I’m Remembering into three parts, each focussing on how her memories have and will continue to change as she learns more about herself and her disease. She says, “The past is never set - it’s prone to change all the time.” Her practice may centre on the past, but Claire is always moving forward.
Real Adult, 2022
Secret Birthday, 2022
Claire Sunho Lee by Luc Schol, 2022
About Claire Sunho Lee
Claire Sunho Lee (b.1993) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher born in Seoul, Korea, based in London, UK. Lee’s practice engages with seeing various meanings within one “reality” by questioning acceptable norms. Through the means of rules, logic, and algorithms, she examines psychological complications, human conditions, trauma, and more.