Folded Bird
Jungeun Lee
Folded Bird (2025) emerges from the artist’s forced departure from a long-term family home following familial rupture, economic precarity, and Seoul’s rapidly rising housing costs. Confronted with sudden displacement and the loss of both domestic space and familial support, the project documents emotional residues left behind and examines the family as a contested site of memory, labor, and power.
Returning to the family structure after prolonged absence revealed how affects and roles are socially coded within the spatial framework of the home. Through performative actions and material elements such as folded paper cranes, rice, and kimchi, the project reflects on gendered domestic labor, intergenerational care, and embodied memory.
These gestures operate as attempts to detach the body from inherited structures of kinship and normative expectations, while seeking moments of deterritorialization from familiar social orders.
Moving beyond autobiographical documentation, Folded Bird situates personal experience within broader social and emotional systems, questioning what constitutes “family” and how its invisible structures continue to shape the body and everyday life.
Jungeun Lee’s practice explores how experiences of identity and belonging can be translated into visual and performative forms through photography, video, performance, and sound. After relocating to Germany in 2019, Lee initiated Belonging Nowhere (2020–2022), a project shaped by the lived condition of a fluid and provisional identity as a Korean woman, immigrant, and queer subject. The work focused on developing artistic strategies for sharing narratives emerging from displacement and social precarity.
In Becoming One, Being Plural (2021–2022), Lee expanded this inquiry toward ecological contexts by collecting traces from spaces where different forms of life and material intersect. Through the construction of ecospheres, the project examined layered and relational forms of identity beyond the human-centered perspective. This research into perception and presence continued in Step Back Closer (2022–2025), which addressed invisible yet persistent phenomena embedded in everyday life through sensory-based
approaches.
Lee’s current project, Folded Bird (2025), originates from the forced departure from a long-term family home caused by familial rupture, economic instability, and rising housing costs in Seoul. The project documents emotional residues left behind during displacement and examines the family as a site shaped by memory, labor, and power relations. Through performative actions and material elements such as folded paper
cranes, rice, and kimchi, Lee reflects on gendered domestic labor, intergenerational care, and embodied memory, seeking alternative ways of reimagining inherited structures of belonging.