Eugenie Lee is a Korean born visual artist whose works focus on the human body and mind, and in particular chronic pain. Her works are an attempt to convey her own bio-psycho-social experiences with pain-related illness through visual metaphor.
Lee communicates her narratives through sculptures, installations and paintings. Her works explore both subjective and objective medical concepts, juxtaposing her perception of her own being with the impersonal clinical methodologies of modern science. Furthermore, they often highlight the private and lonely nature of pain – no one feels the same pain, nor can it be shared. Fascinated by the indiscernible boundary between the rational and irrational fears surrounding chronic pain, the artist interlaces imaginative psychodramas with the latest medical research.
Over the past two years Lee has been involved in a number of innovative collaborative projects, working with some of the world’s leading scientific researchers into chronic pain. These explorations not only broaden Lee’s search for ways to better promote understanding of this silent yet surprisingly widespread illness, but also expand upon an area of medicine that science itself is still learning to fathom – the workings of the human brain, that all pain is subjective, and that its study is complicated by each individual’s perceptions and meanings.
Lee uses art as a medium to explore her own and other pain sufferers’ experiences, transforming an all-consuming, solitary experience into something that can be grasped and shared.