I. The Geometry of Belonging
At first glance, Jung Sun Lee’s paintings seem meticulously controlled—labyrinths of pattern and rhythm that verge on architecture. Her exhibition Nomad Reflection: Life Goes On (San José City College, Oct 1–29, 2025) transformed the Carmen Castellano Fine Arts Center into a landscape of imagination and memory. Towers, bridges, and stair-forms interlock like fragments of lucid dreams, while fine embroidery stitches shimmer across painted surfaces, suturing continents of experience.
Born in Seoul, educated in Korea and France, and now based in San José after years in Berkeley, Atlanta, and Boston, Lee embodies the nomadic spirit of her title. “Nomad,” she said during her artist talk moderated by SJCC Art Professor Emanuela Harris-Sintamarian, “means accepting the new environment and making it by my own way.” Yet life goes on adds a tempered realism—an embrace of endurance over flight.
Her canvases merge Korean pagodas with Bay Area skylines; the Golden Gate Bridge arcs beside a stylized jangseung totem. A moon—perhaps a sun—hangs between them. “In Korea,” she noted, “we use the moon calendar; it’s close to the moon.” The hybrid vista becomes, as she put it, “the form of my life.”
II. Landscape as Inner Cartography
For Lee, landscape is less a genre than a psychological state. “How can I make something invisible—our formless life—into what I can see?” she asked. Each painting fuses real and remembered scenes into composite geographies where emotion becomes terrain. “Even if life keeps changing and sometimes it’s messy,” she said, “we still have strength. I like to express that energy.”
After her formative years in Paris—where she learned “to stand by myself and figure out everything”—geometry became her universal language. “Geometric shapes make it easy to translate my thinking to others,” she explained. Triangles and grids thus serve as translators between cultures, a visual Esperanto of belonging and displacement.
III. Thread as Philosophy
Material choice anchors Lee’s art as firmly as composition. Paint brings immediacy; thread demands patience. “Embroidery gives me a calm, meditative moment,” she said. “I reflect on my life while stitching.” The act pierces the canvas, collapsing the boundary between surface and depth. For Lee, it is both rupture and repair: “Life takes apart and comes together again; I express that through embroidery.”
Her needlework often resembles coded textiles—patches, quilts, talismans. “Sometimes embroidery looks like a patch,” she laughed. “I want to enjoy the moment.”
This playfulness lightens the severity of her black-and-white geometry with pastel pinks and cerulean blues. The tactile shimmer reclaims a traditionally domestic craft as a language of resilience and continuity.
IV. The Domestic Studio
The expansiveness of Lee’s work belies its setting: her San José living room. Each morning after her two daughters leave for school, she unrolls canvas across the floor and paints until mid-afternoon, tidying before they return. “When I was twenty, I would complain I didn’t have space,” she said. “Now it doesn’t matter. If the timing is right, I can do everything.”
That discipline infuses her paintings with intimacy. The domestic becomes cosmic, motherhood folded into process rather than distraction. “Many people say, ‘I’ll start when I have enough space,’” she told students. “You don’t need that—you just start.” The statement has since circulated through SJCC’s art studios as quiet encouragement.
V. Cosmos and Us
A centerpiece of the exhibition, Cosmos and Us, originated in crisis. After relocating to Atlanta and caring for a husband undergoing cancer treatment, Lee felt “insignificant…like a particle of the universe.” Reading Carl Sagan’s Cosmos restored perspective: “Even if we are very small, we are meaningful.”
She began painting from the upper left corner downward, threading together pyramids, Greek temples, Arctic igloos, Roman arches, and Asian pagodas into a single panoramic scroll.
“I wanted to show the history of humans on one screen,” she said. The result is an atlas of existence—an image of the universe rendered from the living-room floor. In it, endurance becomes a cosmology.
VI. The Pulse of Quietness
Despite their density, Lee’s works radiate calm. Harris-Sintamarian called them “organized chaos.” Lee described her process as a pendulum motion between outward experience and inward reflection: “When something from the world hits me, I accept it and reflect it in my way.”
This oscillation shapes both structure and palette. Cool blues meet umbers; pale pinks soften black lines. The tonal shifts recall twilight—neither day nor night—befitting an artist perpetually between homelands. Viewers wander through stair-forms that promise ascent but dissolve into pattern, feeling the rhythm of migration itself.
VII. Toward the Third Dimension
Lee’s newest pieces move painting into space. She cuts, stuffs, and stitches canvas into low reliefs. “I hand-sew each element, fill it with fiber to keep its shape,” she said. “It will be expanded anyway. I’d like to make stitching around us—maybe shapes of beds or water drops.”
The impulse follows naturally from the architectural depth of her compositions. By letting canvases bulge outward, she bridges painting, textile, and sculpture—joining a lineage that includes Louise Bourgeois, Sheila Hicks, and Chiharu Shiota. Yet her tone remains distinctive: lyrical, disciplined, sustained by patience rather than spectacle.
VIII. Humility and Pride
Asked what she would tell her twenty-year-old self, Lee smiled. “Maybe I would feel confused—but proud.” Korean culture, she said, teaches humility; Western life taught her that pride can coexist with grace. “Being humble is not bad,” she reflected, “but keeping myself proudly is also important.”
After years spent raising children and relocating, she regards every hour in the studio as a gift. “Maybe there will be many failures,” she told students. “But if you keep thinking about what you want to do, one day you will do it. It’s not failure—it’s just timing.” The patience of embroidery, she reminds them, is also an ethics of living.
IX. Reading the Threads
Art-historically, Lee stands at a crossroads: the minimal geometry of Korea’s dansaekhwa, Parisian modernist line, and the feminist reclamation of craft. She resists neat classification. “If viewers interpret the image by their own experience, that’s great,” she said. When one audience member saw Machu Picchu in her stacked blocks, she smiled: “Translation by the viewer—that’s connection.”
That idea of connection pervaded the exhibition itself. Harris-Sintamarian’s dialogue framed the show as a cultural bridge; students lingered afterward to discuss technique, identity, and the tactile intelligence of thread. The partnership between SJCC’s Art Gallery and Ethnic Studies Department reinforced Lee’s message that art’s truest medium is exchange.
X. Reflection
Viewed together, the works in Nomad Reflection: Life Goes On form a mirrored architecture of persistence. The oft-casual phrase “life goes on” becomes, in Lee’s hands, an anthem of endurance. Her stitches hold more than pigment and fiber—they hold time itself, binding past to present with the quiet strength of care.
As the evening closed, Lee thanked the audience: “Every moment I can create my work and show it to you is precious.” Her journey—from Seoul to Paris to California—has yielded not only images but philosophy: to build beauty out of flux, to mend what distance tears, and to keep moving forward—stitch by stitch, life after life.
Exhibition: Nomad Reflection: Life Goes On
Artist: Jung Sun Lee
Venue: Carmen Castellano Fine Arts Center, San José City College
Moderator: Emanuela Harris-Sintamarian
Dates: October 1–29, 2025
Sponsors: SJCC Art Gallery and Ethnic Studies Department
