Great Water is a series of photographs of Lake Michigan made from a single location on the south side of Chicago over a ten-year period. An ongoing study of the effects of seasons, weather, and light conditions on the water and the sky, the project is a meditation on cycles of change and passage of time through a single-minded exploration of a place.
The photographs are studies of the ephemeral beauty of materials and conditions that are in a constant state of transformation, and therefore cannot be revealed in a single viewing moment. They also exist as a record of an intimate and sustained exchange between the photographer and her surroundings.
Great Water
By Daniel Schulman
Any overarching assessment of Jin Lee’s work would be incomplete without a consideration of her treatment of Chicago’s most important geographical feature and its biggest ‘thing’—psychologically, physically, socially, historically--Lake Michigan.
Like her other subjects that are treated serially, Salt Mountains, Weeds, and Train Views, Great Water is an extended meditation on change within a structured framework--shaped by routines and journeys both in the city and beyond it. And like those other series, Great Water is not just a depiction of a landscape, but a metaphor for landscape that leads us to deeper understanding of our environment and ourselves.
The relationships among the four series are complex. Given the right perspective, Lee’s Salt Mountains provide strange and cunning artificial substitutes for the mountains that are lacking in flat Illinois. The artist’s framing and her selection of light, mostly filtered and overcast, isolates these heaps and lends them a sense of monumentality that turns them into something strange and forbidding. The Train Views transform the train itself into a kind of camera, sliding back and forth–moving sometimes at high speed, other times not at all--over the same landscape on a predetermined track. The Weeds also focus on a homely subject, yet somehow her treatment of these plants going about their business endows them with remarkable beauty and grace.
Like its counterparts, the Great Water series refers to the landscape genre, but alters the terms, by limiting the view and format to a consistent formula. Lee’s images of two zones--the surface of the water below, and the open expanse of sky above--are at once abstract and constant, but also sensitively register an infinite variation due to shifts in light, atmosphere, reflection, and pattern. Not surprisingly, the artist creates these images from essentially the same vantage point, allowing us to share, or stand in her shoes, as she records and contemplates the changing dynamics of light and weather on our perception of air, water, and space.
For artists and art historians, Lee’s confrontation with the infinite recalls seaside images by Romantics and Realists (Caspar David Friedrich or Gustave Courbet), as well as contemporary practitioners, such as Hiroshi Sugimoto and Roni Horn. Whereas these artists insist on a visual language of universality and monumentality in their landscapes, Lee elicits something that is intensely local and humble–in that we have the feeling that we are standing firmly on a mundane and familiar concrete revetment, which permits us to regenerate our visual acuity merely by looking east, positioned within, but with our backs to, the city behind us. (And, because the horizon line is always in the center of Lee’s images, we also may feel as if we are floating.) Even though we do not know exactly where Lee is standing, the place is familiar to us. And we are relieved that our Lake is still there, offering us such rare and wonderous therapeutic benefits.
Lee’s title for the series Great Water is intriguing and evokes the general rather than the specific that we are accustomed to. Wikipedia tells us that the word "Michigan" is believed to come from the Ojibwe word “ᒥᓯᑲᒥmichi-gami” or “mishigami” meaning great water. And the Lake can be quite great, for being rough, dangerous, and simply immense. But in Lee’s images, conditions are usually rather calm, if never completely stable. It is as if too much drama, from giant swells and crashing waves to terrible ice formations, might distract from the carefully crafted sense of wonder and exploration of subtle transformation in each image.
Catalog essay for Views & Scenes exhibition, Chicago Cultural Center, 2022
Daniel Schulman is Director of Visual Art for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.