Young Joo Lee is a multidisciplinary artist from South Korea, currently living in Cambridge and Los Angeles, USA. In her recent moving image works, Lee’s personal narratives as an immigrant, South Korean, and a woman interweave with the current and historical narratives to investigate the issues of alienation, discrimination, and mental illness in late capitalist society.

Lee’s works have been exhibited and screened at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art- Seoul, Seoul National University Museum of Art, the Drawing Center, Curitiba Biennial, GLAS animation festival, Tricky Women/Tricky Realities festival, Cairo Video Festival, and others. Lee was the Harvard College Fellow in Media Practice (2018-20), MacDowell Fellow (2021), Fulbright Scholar in Sculpture & Digital Media (2015-18), and a recipient of DAAD scholarship (2010-12). She is a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University and an artist-in-residence at the Boston Center for the Arts. Lee holds an MFA in Sculpture at Yale University and an MFA in Film at the Academy of Fine Arts Städelschule Frankfurt.

Project Title: The women who returned from the land of the dead
The women who returned from the land of the dead is a short 2-D animation based on the Korean mythology, Baridegi (The Abandoned Princess Bari). The story is about the discrimination of a woman and her eventual survival and achievement in a patriarchal society. Baridegi’s story will interweave with the stories of the comfort women survivors to reveal the societal conditions in which these women were forced into sexual slavery in a colonized, patriarchal Korean society. Their survival and continued effort to bring justice to the historical crime against women are paralleled with the position of Baridegi, who became the goddess of the shamans.