MINNY LEE: THE STATES PROJECT: HAWAII
Interview by Tara Cronin for the Lenscratch
August 17, 2017
Minny Lee, like myself, is a relative newcomer to the ( Hawaiian ) Islands. Both of us became residents only in recent years. We’ve known each other for just over a decade now, both unexpectedly finding ourselves feeling very much at home in this Pacific place; within that span our lives have taken winding and various paths but one thing we share is clear – the deep and spiritual connection to nature wherever we find it.
“Encounters” was shot while Minny was living in New Jersey; and what moves me the most is proof yet again that yes, cameras lie [ in a most magnificent way ], and the command with which Minny captured and created utterly otherworldly images from a small and somewhat limited space to work with. Each twilight, she went out back and brought her camera to the small woods behind her home and made it her practice to do this regularly. Speaking to Minny, and getting to know her voraciously growing library full of Thoreau, Emerson, books on Concord, MA and Walden Pond, one gets the sense of her sensitive appreciation for the nature surrounding her. But looking with all my senses at her “Encounters” project, it becomes even more crystallized.
Can you remember one of the first times you felt moved by what we call “nature?” Could you describe it?
When I finished first grade, my family moved to the countryside in South Korea, about one hour north from Seoul. My father built a house on a hilltop mountain where he gradually created a beautiful garden. In late spring, I noticed feathery and fernlike plants coming out of the ground. I thought they were weeds until beautiful white, pink, and purple flowers bloomed one day. I learned that they were cosmoses. In South Korea, there is a rainy season in mid to late July. After hard rain for two weeks, cosmos stalks bent downward towards the ground. I thought they were dead but after a week or so, they grew upward again. The resilience of this fragile plant impressed me. In the fall, cosmoses bloomed on both sides of the country roads by the rice fields. I will never forget the first time seeing swaying cosmoses and swaying golden colored rice stalks on the school bus going home.
What were some of the thoughts and feelings running through you while shooting Encounters?
While observing trees more closely, my mind went to the time I spent in the Korean countryside. I realized how much I was disconnected from nature after living in big cities since high school. With the Encounters series, I tried to not have any preconceived ideas. Rather, I tried to follow my intuition and react to what was in front of me. It required a lot of concentration and as time passed, I focused more on winter trees at night, which required physical endurance. However, my mind stayed sharper and I could see each tree better within the dark silhouettes.
I know you are very attuned and sensitive to nature. I am as well while some people say they are not. Personally I believe we all are, each of us innately has that gift; but for a myriad of reasons some of us become more or less sensitive to that voice. What are your thoughts on this voice, how to listen to it, what dulls it, what it affects, etcetera ?
I also believe that most people are inclined to be attuned with nature. Otherwise, why would people spend time and money on gardening and landscaping or going away to the mountains or ocean-side? Some people maintain that inclination while others lose it. I think it depends on the upbringing of individual—growing up how much was the person influenced by nature. Listening to nature requires openness and concentration. In his “Walking” essay, Henry David Thoreau wrote: “I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields.” Perhaps not many of us can do that these days but at least we can try to let go of worldly thoughts and engagements while being in nature.
What are some concepts and themes you hope to cover through your work, in any of your projects?
The main thread of my work is about time and place but it is not necessarily about a specific time and place. I believe that we simultaneously live in the past, present, and future because humans can remember and imagine. Coexistence of different times, passages of time, and timelessness all exist in my work. I am also interested in capturing the state of mind and pushing the notion of photography. Once a publisher told me that my work is about “poetry of photography.” I think he was right. It is the poetic possibility of photography that keeps me wandering with my camera year after year.
Name your top 7 books that also correlate to your work, whether or not you’ve read them yet. [ They can be a to-finish, or a to-read ].
Andrei Tarkovsky “Sculpting in Time”
Marcel Proust “In Search of Lost Time”
Hermann Hesse “Demian”
Henry Callahan “Water’s Edge”
Masahisa Fukase “The Ravens”
Henry David Thoreau “Walden”
Wassily Kandinsky “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”
Encounters has also been a handmade book made by you, an equally beautifully-made book published by Datz Press in Seoul, Korea, as well a very sensory installation you created at a few locations. What do you feel makes it adapt so well to these various mediums?
Whether it is a book or an installation, my concern was to make a connection with the viewer. With the “Encounters” book, I tried to take the viewer into my journey in nature. The book starts with intimate portraits of trees and segue into my essay about living in the countryside of South Korea. It is a story quite personal to me but I believe that even the most personal story or memory can be the most universal. The size of the book is small (5.5×7.5 inches) so that people can hold the book in their palm but it is one long piece (176-inch long accordion) so it continues as one piece. The whole process (from the first book dummy to the published book) took me six years. I modified it, little by little until it felt right. With the “Nightwalker” installation, rather than placing picture frames on the wall, I used the whole exhibition space to showcase my prints by hanging them from the ceiling. As viewers walked around, they made the prints move to and fro and they also became part of the exhibition. By playing sound recordings from different seasons in nature, I tried to evoke the feeling of walking in the forest. The sensory experience was exactly what I was trying to experiment with this piece.
What’s a book/movie/quote/person/artist/or place, that’s is giving you inspiration these days?
Peter Wohlleben “The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World”
Movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”
F. Scott Fitzgerald “The Great Gatsby”
Junot Díaz “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”
Henry David Thoreau “Walden” and his journals
Masahisa Fukase “The Raven”
Daido Moriyama “Dazai”
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Walden Pond
Montauk
Big Island, Hawai’i
ICP Alumni Spotlight: Minny Lee
November 8, 2016
Interview conducted by Eti Bonn-Muller
Minny Lee graduated from the one-year Documentary Photography and Photojournalism (PJ) program at ICP in 2008 and from the ICP-Bard MFA program in 2016. She is currently teaching an Introduction to Photography course for undergraduate students at the University of Hawaii and will participate in the group show, From Walden, at the Datz Museum of Art in South Korea.
To read more, please click HERE .
Spotlight Series: Featuring Minny Lee
JUNE 4, 2016
Interview by Michael Hopkins of Neoteric Art
Michael Hopkins: On your website, you write about your video Strand saying that, “Norway inspired me to make this work.” Could you go into detail about this inspiration?
Minny Lee: I visited Norway for the first time in 2013 to participate in an artist residency on a small island called, Halsnøy. I flew to Berlin then transferred to Bergen, a port city located in the western part of Norway. From Bergen, I rode a boat for two hours and thirty minutes to Stord Island, then from there, transferred to another boat to Halsnøy Island. During the two boat rides, I saw several women knitting for the duration of the voyage. There are a noticeable number of yarn shops in any Norwegian city. Once I got to Halsnøy and stayed there for three weeks, I understood why knitting is popular in Norway. I was there in May and the temperature was often in the mid 30°F range and it rained every day except for three days. In May, the sun doesn’t go down until 9pm or 10pm but in the fall and winter, the sun goes down at around 4pm. The winters there are long and cold so sweaters and wool socks are must haves. Some men knit in Norway as well but it is mostly performed by women who knit for their family. I went to a local yarn store and saw housewives coming into the shop and it looked like it was a social gathering spot as well. I only knew how to knit a simple wool scarf so I bought yarn and started to knit and began recording a video of me knitting in various locations. The knitting is connected to Norwegians and their culture and tradition but the act of knitting is also about the passage of time.
MH: Has the photographer Harry Callahan had any influence on your work?
ML: Harry Callahan is the single most important photographer for me. I admire his work very much for his long years of dedication to the medium and his experimental spirit. I love Callahan’s Water’s Edge photobook and his writing in the Afterword. Callahan’s writing reveals a lot about him as a photographer and his philosophy as the great artist that he is. He began the theme of water’s edge in 1938 at Lake Huron and later at Lake Michigan. He continued the series at New England beaches. After forty years of doing this, he wrote, “I think that nearly every artist continually wants to reach the edge of nothingness—the point where you can’t go any farther. I feel I have come close to that at various times with the Beach Series photographs. A determined single-mindedness and an insistent inner need has led me to that point.” I feel this idea is similar to Asian philosophy, particularly Buddhism. One can meditate for so long that one can finally reach a state of nothingness—transcending one’s self and arriving somewhere beyond. I love Callahan’s photographs of nature but I like his photographs of his wife, Eleanor even more. They reveal an exchange of love between husband and wife, photographer and subject. How much Eleanor gave in and offered herself but also how much Callahan loved to photograph her—so tender and loving, experimental, and formally exciting too. Callahan’s photographs contain an aspect of simplicity of form rooted from his deep observation and understanding of the subject matter.
MH: Some of your self-portraits remind me of film stills. Have you been influenced by certain movies?
ML: My photography has been mostly non-narrative and void of human presence. When I started the self-portrait series in 2010, I felt a need to construct a narrative. Growing up, I didn’t have the opportunity to watch movies, except ones they aired on TV. Once I started making videos a few years ago, I started to pay attention to the art of narrative and cinematography in films. When I make the self-portrait, I draw inspiration from a 17th-century Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer. He painted about 35 paintings in his lifetime and they are often paintings of people engaged in mundane activities, such as a milkmaid pouring milk from a pitcher into a bowl. I am drawn to the ambiguity within the story. My favorite painting is Mistress and Maid (c. 1667-1668). There is a maid who is delivering a letter to a mistress wearing a yellow fur gown sitting at her desk. While her right hand is holding a pen, her left-hand touches her chin slightly. It seems that she is in the middle of writing a letter and was interrupted by the delivery of the letter. There is the sense of anxiety and wonder in her gestures. I have been wondering about the content of the letter and story of the mistress ever since I saw the painting but it is still a mystery to me. This is the power of a still image and what a painting can do to the viewer. With my self-portrait series, I work around the atmosphere without adding preps or artificial lighting, which is the polar opposite of typical moviemaking. I am interested in looking at domestic settings and making something out of it.
MH: Your photograph Self-Portrait, Bethlehem, PA, 2011 has an eerie, unsettling feel to it; things may not be as they first appear? You mentioned that “a lot of my photographs are dark,” and that “some people have mentioned David Lynch,” could you comment on this further?
ML: There are two sides of darkness I am referring to: the psychological sense and the temporal sense. I associate traumatic history of the place to my own trauma for the former (psychological darkness). In the beginning, I made self-portraits in places that had experienced war: an Italian convent used as a military barracks during World War II and then abandoned, an American military base disguised as a fishing village then abandoned, Pearl Harbor, etc. While studying its history, I found that the Hotel Bethlehem had been used as a convalescence home for soldiers returning from WWI. I grew up in Korea when the country went through forced industrialization, military dictatorships, political upheavals, and fighting for democracy. I retain some pleasant memories but there are many horrible memories from my childhood. I tried to tie in with this past history by creating a certain mood in the picture.
In the temporal sense, I like to photograph at night where there is very little available light. The camera is a magic box that can capture images even in a complete darkness. It requires a long exposure and patience. Most people associate night with pitch-black darkness. In reality, many colors flourish at night. I once photographed a brown colored sky at 11pm and at midnight, a bluish-greenish sky. I see things much better at night and my senses are more attuned and focused. The night evokes tension and suspense. During the day, there are too many visible things; I end up seeing much less.
Some people mentioned that my self-portraits reminded them of David Lynch’s films. I only watched one of his films a few years ago and I am not very familiar with his work. People would characterize his films as eerie and strange. Perhaps they see that kind of sentiment in my photographs. Someone mentioned that my pictures from the night sea reminded him of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks TV series. He said that each episode begins with falling water and there is sadness to it. He thought my sea pictures convey a passage of time and sadness.
MH: In your statement, you say that “I am interested in the coexistence between past and present, dreams and reality, and absence and presence.” Can you tell me how this relates to your Teatro series from Italy, 2009?
ML: Teatro La Fenice was the perfect place for making images addressing duality because of its unusual history. Its fate thwarted its fame several times. La Fenice was built in 1792 to replace San Benedetto Theater that was burnt to the ground in 1774. But La Fenice too was burnt in 1836 and again in 1996. It was rebuilt and reopened in 2003. When I visited in October 2009, navigating through isles, balconies, and backstage, I was asking, “Why did this place and its predecessor burn so many times?” I fathomed that there could be ghosts who walked around and remembered their glorious times. I thought about how I could photograph their absence while still feeling their presence. Through the slit of stage curtains, I imagined the opera singer waiting to stage his or her grand entry to perform. For the theater seats, I imagined audiences pouring into the theater looking for their seats in anticipation of a great performance. I let ghosts from the past glory guide me through all these imagined scenarios. The photograph of theater seats with a spotlight pointing in the middle is from Teatro Malibran, which was opened in 1678. In these two theaters, the coexistence between past and present, dreams and reality, and absence and presence was ever more appealing.
MH: In the installation Nightwalker, your tree photographs are printed on rice paper and hang from the ceiling reminding me of scrolls. Were you inspired by hanging scrolls from your native South Korea?
ML: For the Nightwalker installation, I did not think about hanging scrolls in particular. I tried to activate the exhibition space by animating prints and adding sound. I thought that if I have several prints that are hung not too far from each other, going through them could evoke the feeling of walking in a forest. I turned on a fan from the side so that the prints would move to and fro. I also played sounds of nature that I recorded during different seasons. I tried to bring in different senses to make a sensory experience rather than limiting it to a visual experience. I chose rice paper because of its transparent quality when hit by a spotlight. Rice paper looks fragile but it is very resilient. The Nightwalker installation was a turning point for me in terms of my approach to exhibition space and soliciting viewer engagement.
Minny Lee Interviewed by Hyungjo Moon
ICP-Bard MFA Blog
February 26, 2016
Hyungjo Moon: Childhood memories seem to be a central part of your work. Why?
Minny Lee: I always thought that my childhood in South Korea was ordinary and there was not much to talk about. After spending a lot of time in the US, I realized that my childhood was unusual due to the tumultuous history of Korea at that time and the economic severity of my family in the midst of country’s industrialization. The most recent video I made was based on searching for my earliest memory when I was living in Daegu (a southern city in South Korea) with my grandmother and her mother-in-law. Growing up apart from my parents and siblings from age two to six and then reuniting with them and living in the countryside surrounded by nature influenced me as a person and an artist. Living on a farm on a foothill of mountain from age seven was a completely different experience. It was a quiet and self-sustaining life. I attempt to translate that experience through my paper cut-out work. Its contents reflect my time in the countryside, living closely with flowers, trees, bugs, stars, the sky, and stream.
From age eleven, I lived in Seoul—the capital of South Korea—and from that time, I started to be aware of government driven industrialization, military dictatorships, and democratic movements. Korea’s long Confucianism tradition taught me to respect elders and parents but at the same time, it was repressing the society at large. Living in a politically unstable country with Confucianism pressure, I had to escape somewhere. During high school, the answer was poetry and novels. Both my father and eight-grade teacher emphasized reading world classics. In my youth in Korea, reading was considered as a fundamental ability of the educated individual. I strongly responded to literature in particular and started to write poems during my high school years. My work would not be the same if I did not have literature growing up.
HM: For your solo thesis show, you will encourage visitors to handle your cut-out boxes to form images. On opening night, you will do a performance using cut-outs and storytelling. Why is evoking viewer participation so important to you?
ML: I am interested in creating an experience through an exhibition, by being thoughtful about utilizing the whole exhibition space and inviting viewer participation. It frustrates me when objects in museums and galleries get overly protected by barricades and guards. I understand preservation issues and market values but when an artwork is treated more importantly than visitor observation and enjoyment (whom the work is made for and addressed to), I feel there is a loss of morality.
I like to let people touch my work and awaken different senses such as seeing, hearing, touching, and smelling. Sensing can evoke the viewer’s memory. I made cutouts on a vellum paper and attached them to a black box on one end while leaving the other end open. One can see the content of cutouts when shining the box with a flashlight. They are fragments of my childhood memories but I hope that viewers can form mental pictures of their own childhood memories. This possibility of connections and expansions makes me excited and motivates me to work in a participatory practice.
HM: You often title your photograph with the name of the place you took the photo. What significance does the place have in your photography?
ML: I took my first photography class in the fall of 1999. One day the teacher took us to a Bill Brandt (1904-1983) exhibition at ICP Museum. It was the first time I saw so many great photographs gathered in one place. While Brandt was experimenting with abstractions and surrealism with photography, he was mainly a photojournalist working for print media. Brandt’s generation and the generation after him titled photographs with subject, place, and year. Richard Avedon was not considered as a documentary photographer but he also titled the same way. One of his titles would read: Marian Anderson, contralto, New York, June 30, 1955. I studied Documentary Photography and Photojournalism Studies at ICP School from 2007 to 2008 and learned a great deal about the importance of captions, which provide context to the viewer. Being in a specific place at a specific time means something. Clicking the shutter release one second earlier or one second later can make a huge difference. If you look at Robert Frank’s contact sheets from The Americans or Richard Avedon’s contact sheets of sittings with models, you will understand how crucial the timing is, in addition to the specific place and specific situation they are in. I often include the place and year in my title because it provides both the least and most information I can provide to the viewer without imposing any further meaning to the picture.
HM: It seems that trees are your main subject matters and walking is an important method of making work.
ML: I started to photograph trees since 2008 after realizing my interest in trees, which has a lot to do with living in nature during my childhood. In terms of walking, it comes from my early training in photography—from street photography to documentary photography. New York has a great tradition in street photography and you get to see a lot if you live in New York. With street photography, a photographer has to be in right place and right time and be ready when interesting thing happens. My approach is more about discovery of wonder—being a visual poet with a camera. In documentary photography, a photographer pursues the same subject matter for a long time by returning to the same people and place. I tend to walk a lot when making work but I also like to return to the same place many times to have deeper explorations. Walking is a strange exercise. I can be completely mindful of myself or completely open to observations of the world. Unexpected encounters make walking worthwhile. A work becomes more interesting when an artist’s introspection collide with the outer world.
HM: Making artist books has been important part of your practice. Do you see your book as an object in itself?
ML: An artist book is an intimate medium to invite viewers to experience my work. I like small books that people can hold in their hands. A book consists of a sequence of pages and therefore it is a time-based medium. I can intend to lead the viewer in a certain way by sequencing and designing the book but each viewer will experience and react to the book differently due to their diverse backgrounds and histories. I make a book as an object because I pay great attention to materials and details. However, I don’t want to revere book as a precious object and display it inside of glass vitrine. Books should be experienced through close physical contact and that’s why I still like to read traditionally printed books. When I was making books last March, I thought that I could just make books for the rest of my life and be happy forever after.
Paola Núñez Solorio of Tracking Art featured images and Q&A on encounters series.
Conversation with Minny Lee
Tracking Art (November 21, 2011)
How did you start with Encounters?
The first image came about due to a class assignment at ICP while I was a student of the One-Year Documentary and Photojournalism Program in 2008. The assignment was to read an article about “Sleep” and to make an image to accompany the article. I had a vivid pre-visualization of what I wanted to photograph: the feeling of falling trees during twilight hours on a rainy day. I liked the results from that exercise but I didn’t continue as I was pursuing documentary photography. In October 2008, I met Italian photographer, Giorgia Fiorio. She encouraged me to continue photographing trees after seeing my tree pictures. Giorgia made me realize that I don’t have to limit my photography to any genres or subject matters. Instead it is important to pursue where my interests lie.
Can you talk a little about your childhood? In particular, can you describe briefly how your childhood is reflected in the project?
I was born during South Korea’s industrialization period. Both of my parents worked and it was hard for them to take care of both my sister and I. They sent me to my paternal grandmother from age 2 to 6. This event changed my life forever. When I reunited with my family, I felt alienated. When I was 7, my family moved to the countryside and that’s when I started interacting with nature. My father built a house on a hill and made beautiful gardens. I looked at the natural settings and observed how things changed over time. Later in my life, I lived in big cities but my affinity towards nature always remained inside of me. When I began the Encounters project, I felt happy to be able to connect with nature again.
Trees are the main subjects of this project. What do you find so appealing about them?
Nature has a lot of elements: trees, flowers, animals, rocks, water, wind, etc. When I began my project, I decided to first concentrate on trees as trees alone is a huge subject. When I started photographing trees, I realized that each tree has its own personality and character just like human beings. I am attracted to those trees with character but I am also attracted to small elements in nature. I am fascinated by how well trees adjust to natural environments. I also think trees express feelings by the shaping of roots, trunks, branches, and leaves.
In your artist statement, you wrote, “I am interested in the coexistence between absence and presence, past and present and dream and reality.” Is this something that you are intentionally looking for? Can you talk a little bit about it?
When I photograph, it is more of natural discovery of these things rather than looking for them intentionally. They coexist without defined lines. We don’t always live in the present and in reality. We constantly go back and forth between the past and present and dream and reality. From the absence of something, I can imagine the presence of something. When I am photographing, I am constantly revisiting different time and place and that makes photographing more interesting.
How important is the final presentations of your images? What kind of methods have you used to present Encounters series?
For me, how I show my images in their final forms is very important. So the thinking process doesn’t stop at making or editing images but continues to the end of the “life of images.” When presenting my photographs, the viewers’ physical and direct experience with my images is important for me. For formal presentation, I mount the pictures bleeding to the edge. I prefer 40”x50” size in order to overwhelm viewers and make them feel like they are standing in front of real trees. I also presented an installation with prints hanging from the ceiling, moving to and fro due to an electric fan, and sounds of nature that I recorded during different seasons and times. When the viewers entered into the space, I wanted them to feel like they entered into a forest. I feel that photographs can evoke many different senses, not just visual sense.
In Praise of Trees
The contents of some of her writings and the thematic range of her work emphasize Minny Lee’s logical connection to an artistic approach inspired by Asian visual traditions. She often cites the work of Chinese photographer Don Hong-Oai as a reference, but we could also mention that of another Chinese photographer, Lang Jingshan, whose work is characterized by a certain pictorialism, though this term is usually reserved for Western photography. In any case, both express their attachment to nature, and trees are central figures in their vision of the landscape. Minny Lee has said that from her earliest childhood, when she lived in the country, she observed the natural world around her on a daily basis. Surely the solitude she has described, coupled with a rather reserved personality, have led her to look carefully at the natural landscape. While her approach is not scholarly, she does, however, pay close attention to the seasonal changes in plants. It seems that this world whose life she observes interests her much more than her human surroundings, taking over her mind and giving rise to an artistic calling. Photography has clearly been a way of translating her experience. Trees have become practically the single theme of her work, the main character in a story that she has dedicated herself to composing in images. It’s not an exaggeration to call trees characters in this context – with personalities or inner lives – since in her eyes trees move, vibrate, and communicate, and her images translate the range of feelings that this observation inspires. She works at distilling these forms, which are never the same from one photograph to the next. She emphasizes certain seasons and certain light conditions that correspond to her vision: winter, when trees are bare and their silhouettes reach upwards in a motion that looks like calligraphy, and twilight, when trees stand out against a colorful sky. Through this approach, which consists in very methodically exploring the figure of the tree in its various aspects, we can identify in Minny Lee’s work a kind of connection with aesthetic concepts of Western art. Indeed, it’s hard not to think of the principle of variations on a theme which, in painting as well as music, has known many incarnations, from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations to Claude Monet’s cathedrals.
In this way, Minny Lee’s work seems to express reactions, concerns, and inspirations that are related to the fact that she has lived in the United States for a long time now. For example, these artistic influences can be read in her way of handling color: each image is based on a range of monochromatic shades and the dominant tone varies from one tree to another. Yet this doesn’t mean that Minny Lee explores the entire color spectrum: she often plays with tones that are dull and even dark – in all the meanings of the word. This way of taking photos creates an atmosphere reminiscent of dreams, and the delicately-created sensations of movement and blurriness accentuate this impression. It’s also noticeable in her work that she uses the entire surface of the photograph bordered by the frame, filling up the space with colored matter without leaving any blanks. This practice also distances her somewhat from ideas of representation in Asian visual art. And then, of course, there’s the composition, which is organized around a limited number of elements: the tree and almost nothing else. It’s a bit like the painter Giorgio Morandi not leaving his studio and always painting the same objects around him. There are photographers who travel the globe in search of new subjects, and then there are those who operate in a limited territory, slowly discovering depth and fulfillment at their own pace, by staying near the same subjects. Minny Lee clearly belongs to this second category. In her eyes, the nature surrounding her is an endless source of new events.
Gabriel Bauret (Curator)
(Gabriel Bauret’s article accompanied Minny Lee’s solo exhibition at Gallery Now in Seoul, South Korea in January 2015. It is included in her artist book, encounters, published by Datz Press.)
Interview by Tara Cronin for the Lenscratch
August 17, 2017
Minny Lee, like myself, is a relative newcomer to the ( Hawaiian ) Islands. Both of us became residents only in recent years. We’ve known each other for just over a decade now, both unexpectedly finding ourselves feeling very much at home in this Pacific place; within that span our lives have taken winding and various paths but one thing we share is clear – the deep and spiritual connection to nature wherever we find it.
“Encounters” was shot while Minny was living in New Jersey; and what moves me the most is proof yet again that yes, cameras lie [ in a most magnificent way ], and the command with which Minny captured and created utterly otherworldly images from a small and somewhat limited space to work with. Each twilight, she went out back and brought her camera to the small woods behind her home and made it her practice to do this regularly. Speaking to Minny, and getting to know her voraciously growing library full of Thoreau, Emerson, books on Concord, MA and Walden Pond, one gets the sense of her sensitive appreciation for the nature surrounding her. But looking with all my senses at her “Encounters” project, it becomes even more crystallized.
Can you remember one of the first times you felt moved by what we call “nature?” Could you describe it?
When I finished first grade, my family moved to the countryside in South Korea, about one hour north from Seoul. My father built a house on a hilltop mountain where he gradually created a beautiful garden. In late spring, I noticed feathery and fernlike plants coming out of the ground. I thought they were weeds until beautiful white, pink, and purple flowers bloomed one day. I learned that they were cosmoses. In South Korea, there is a rainy season in mid to late July. After hard rain for two weeks, cosmos stalks bent downward towards the ground. I thought they were dead but after a week or so, they grew upward again. The resilience of this fragile plant impressed me. In the fall, cosmoses bloomed on both sides of the country roads by the rice fields. I will never forget the first time seeing swaying cosmoses and swaying golden colored rice stalks on the school bus going home.
What were some of the thoughts and feelings running through you while shooting Encounters?
While observing trees more closely, my mind went to the time I spent in the Korean countryside. I realized how much I was disconnected from nature after living in big cities since high school. With the Encounters series, I tried to not have any preconceived ideas. Rather, I tried to follow my intuition and react to what was in front of me. It required a lot of concentration and as time passed, I focused more on winter trees at night, which required physical endurance. However, my mind stayed sharper and I could see each tree better within the dark silhouettes.
I know you are very attuned and sensitive to nature. I am as well while some people say they are not. Personally I believe we all are, each of us innately has that gift; but for a myriad of reasons some of us become more or less sensitive to that voice. What are your thoughts on this voice, how to listen to it, what dulls it, what it affects, etcetera ?
I also believe that most people are inclined to be attuned with nature. Otherwise, why would people spend time and money on gardening and landscaping or going away to the mountains or ocean-side? Some people maintain that inclination while others lose it. I think it depends on the upbringing of individual—growing up how much was the person influenced by nature. Listening to nature requires openness and concentration. In his “Walking” essay, Henry David Thoreau wrote: “I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields.” Perhaps not many of us can do that these days but at least we can try to let go of worldly thoughts and engagements while being in nature.
What are some concepts and themes you hope to cover through your work, in any of your projects?
The main thread of my work is about time and place but it is not necessarily about a specific time and place. I believe that we simultaneously live in the past, present, and future because humans can remember and imagine. Coexistence of different times, passages of time, and timelessness all exist in my work. I am also interested in capturing the state of mind and pushing the notion of photography. Once a publisher told me that my work is about “poetry of photography.” I think he was right. It is the poetic possibility of photography that keeps me wandering with my camera year after year.
Name your top 7 books that also correlate to your work, whether or not you’ve read them yet. [ They can be a to-finish, or a to-read ].
Andrei Tarkovsky “Sculpting in Time”
Marcel Proust “In Search of Lost Time”
Hermann Hesse “Demian”
Henry Callahan “Water’s Edge”
Masahisa Fukase “The Ravens”
Henry David Thoreau “Walden”
Wassily Kandinsky “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”
Encounters has also been a handmade book made by you, an equally beautifully-made book published by Datz Press in Seoul, Korea, as well a very sensory installation you created at a few locations. What do you feel makes it adapt so well to these various mediums?
Whether it is a book or an installation, my concern was to make a connection with the viewer. With the “Encounters” book, I tried to take the viewer into my journey in nature. The book starts with intimate portraits of trees and segue into my essay about living in the countryside of South Korea. It is a story quite personal to me but I believe that even the most personal story or memory can be the most universal. The size of the book is small (5.5×7.5 inches) so that people can hold the book in their palm but it is one long piece (176-inch long accordion) so it continues as one piece. The whole process (from the first book dummy to the published book) took me six years. I modified it, little by little until it felt right. With the “Nightwalker” installation, rather than placing picture frames on the wall, I used the whole exhibition space to showcase my prints by hanging them from the ceiling. As viewers walked around, they made the prints move to and fro and they also became part of the exhibition. By playing sound recordings from different seasons in nature, I tried to evoke the feeling of walking in the forest. The sensory experience was exactly what I was trying to experiment with this piece.
What’s a book/movie/quote/person/artist/or place, that’s is giving you inspiration these days?
Peter Wohlleben “The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World”
Movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”
F. Scott Fitzgerald “The Great Gatsby”
Junot Díaz “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”
Henry David Thoreau “Walden” and his journals
Masahisa Fukase “The Raven”
Daido Moriyama “Dazai”
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Walden Pond
Montauk
Big Island, Hawai’i
ICP Alumni Spotlight: Minny Lee
November 8, 2016
Interview conducted by Eti Bonn-Muller
Minny Lee graduated from the one-year Documentary Photography and Photojournalism (PJ) program at ICP in 2008 and from the ICP-Bard MFA program in 2016. She is currently teaching an Introduction to Photography course for undergraduate students at the University of Hawaii and will participate in the group show, From Walden, at the Datz Museum of Art in South Korea.
To read more, please click HERE .
Spotlight Series: Featuring Minny Lee
JUNE 4, 2016
Interview by Michael Hopkins of Neoteric Art
Michael Hopkins: On your website, you write about your video Strand saying that, “Norway inspired me to make this work.” Could you go into detail about this inspiration?
Minny Lee: I visited Norway for the first time in 2013 to participate in an artist residency on a small island called, Halsnøy. I flew to Berlin then transferred to Bergen, a port city located in the western part of Norway. From Bergen, I rode a boat for two hours and thirty minutes to Stord Island, then from there, transferred to another boat to Halsnøy Island. During the two boat rides, I saw several women knitting for the duration of the voyage. There are a noticeable number of yarn shops in any Norwegian city. Once I got to Halsnøy and stayed there for three weeks, I understood why knitting is popular in Norway. I was there in May and the temperature was often in the mid 30°F range and it rained every day except for three days. In May, the sun doesn’t go down until 9pm or 10pm but in the fall and winter, the sun goes down at around 4pm. The winters there are long and cold so sweaters and wool socks are must haves. Some men knit in Norway as well but it is mostly performed by women who knit for their family. I went to a local yarn store and saw housewives coming into the shop and it looked like it was a social gathering spot as well. I only knew how to knit a simple wool scarf so I bought yarn and started to knit and began recording a video of me knitting in various locations. The knitting is connected to Norwegians and their culture and tradition but the act of knitting is also about the passage of time.
Strand from Minny Lee on Vimeo.
MH: Has the photographer Harry Callahan had any influence on your work?
ML: Harry Callahan is the single most important photographer for me. I admire his work very much for his long years of dedication to the medium and his experimental spirit. I love Callahan’s Water’s Edge photobook and his writing in the Afterword. Callahan’s writing reveals a lot about him as a photographer and his philosophy as the great artist that he is. He began the theme of water’s edge in 1938 at Lake Huron and later at Lake Michigan. He continued the series at New England beaches. After forty years of doing this, he wrote, “I think that nearly every artist continually wants to reach the edge of nothingness—the point where you can’t go any farther. I feel I have come close to that at various times with the Beach Series photographs. A determined single-mindedness and an insistent inner need has led me to that point.” I feel this idea is similar to Asian philosophy, particularly Buddhism. One can meditate for so long that one can finally reach a state of nothingness—transcending one’s self and arriving somewhere beyond. I love Callahan’s photographs of nature but I like his photographs of his wife, Eleanor even more. They reveal an exchange of love between husband and wife, photographer and subject. How much Eleanor gave in and offered herself but also how much Callahan loved to photograph her—so tender and loving, experimental, and formally exciting too. Callahan’s photographs contain an aspect of simplicity of form rooted from his deep observation and understanding of the subject matter.
MH: Some of your self-portraits remind me of film stills. Have you been influenced by certain movies?
ML: My photography has been mostly non-narrative and void of human presence. When I started the self-portrait series in 2010, I felt a need to construct a narrative. Growing up, I didn’t have the opportunity to watch movies, except ones they aired on TV. Once I started making videos a few years ago, I started to pay attention to the art of narrative and cinematography in films. When I make the self-portrait, I draw inspiration from a 17th-century Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer. He painted about 35 paintings in his lifetime and they are often paintings of people engaged in mundane activities, such as a milkmaid pouring milk from a pitcher into a bowl. I am drawn to the ambiguity within the story. My favorite painting is Mistress and Maid (c. 1667-1668). There is a maid who is delivering a letter to a mistress wearing a yellow fur gown sitting at her desk. While her right hand is holding a pen, her left-hand touches her chin slightly. It seems that she is in the middle of writing a letter and was interrupted by the delivery of the letter. There is the sense of anxiety and wonder in her gestures. I have been wondering about the content of the letter and story of the mistress ever since I saw the painting but it is still a mystery to me. This is the power of a still image and what a painting can do to the viewer. With my self-portrait series, I work around the atmosphere without adding preps or artificial lighting, which is the polar opposite of typical moviemaking. I am interested in looking at domestic settings and making something out of it.
MH: Your photograph Self-Portrait, Bethlehem, PA, 2011 has an eerie, unsettling feel to it; things may not be as they first appear? You mentioned that “a lot of my photographs are dark,” and that “some people have mentioned David Lynch,” could you comment on this further?
ML: There are two sides of darkness I am referring to: the psychological sense and the temporal sense. I associate traumatic history of the place to my own trauma for the former (psychological darkness). In the beginning, I made self-portraits in places that had experienced war: an Italian convent used as a military barracks during World War II and then abandoned, an American military base disguised as a fishing village then abandoned, Pearl Harbor, etc. While studying its history, I found that the Hotel Bethlehem had been used as a convalescence home for soldiers returning from WWI. I grew up in Korea when the country went through forced industrialization, military dictatorships, political upheavals, and fighting for democracy. I retain some pleasant memories but there are many horrible memories from my childhood. I tried to tie in with this past history by creating a certain mood in the picture.
In the temporal sense, I like to photograph at night where there is very little available light. The camera is a magic box that can capture images even in a complete darkness. It requires a long exposure and patience. Most people associate night with pitch-black darkness. In reality, many colors flourish at night. I once photographed a brown colored sky at 11pm and at midnight, a bluish-greenish sky. I see things much better at night and my senses are more attuned and focused. The night evokes tension and suspense. During the day, there are too many visible things; I end up seeing much less.
Some people mentioned that my self-portraits reminded them of David Lynch’s films. I only watched one of his films a few years ago and I am not very familiar with his work. People would characterize his films as eerie and strange. Perhaps they see that kind of sentiment in my photographs. Someone mentioned that my pictures from the night sea reminded him of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks TV series. He said that each episode begins with falling water and there is sadness to it. He thought my sea pictures convey a passage of time and sadness.
MH: In your statement, you say that “I am interested in the coexistence between past and present, dreams and reality, and absence and presence.” Can you tell me how this relates to your Teatro series from Italy, 2009?
ML: Teatro La Fenice was the perfect place for making images addressing duality because of its unusual history. Its fate thwarted its fame several times. La Fenice was built in 1792 to replace San Benedetto Theater that was burnt to the ground in 1774. But La Fenice too was burnt in 1836 and again in 1996. It was rebuilt and reopened in 2003. When I visited in October 2009, navigating through isles, balconies, and backstage, I was asking, “Why did this place and its predecessor burn so many times?” I fathomed that there could be ghosts who walked around and remembered their glorious times. I thought about how I could photograph their absence while still feeling their presence. Through the slit of stage curtains, I imagined the opera singer waiting to stage his or her grand entry to perform. For the theater seats, I imagined audiences pouring into the theater looking for their seats in anticipation of a great performance. I let ghosts from the past glory guide me through all these imagined scenarios. The photograph of theater seats with a spotlight pointing in the middle is from Teatro Malibran, which was opened in 1678. In these two theaters, the coexistence between past and present, dreams and reality, and absence and presence was ever more appealing.
MH: In the installation Nightwalker, your tree photographs are printed on rice paper and hang from the ceiling reminding me of scrolls. Were you inspired by hanging scrolls from your native South Korea?
ML: For the Nightwalker installation, I did not think about hanging scrolls in particular. I tried to activate the exhibition space by animating prints and adding sound. I thought that if I have several prints that are hung not too far from each other, going through them could evoke the feeling of walking in a forest. I turned on a fan from the side so that the prints would move to and fro. I also played sounds of nature that I recorded during different seasons. I tried to bring in different senses to make a sensory experience rather than limiting it to a visual experience. I chose rice paper because of its transparent quality when hit by a spotlight. Rice paper looks fragile but it is very resilient. The Nightwalker installation was a turning point for me in terms of my approach to exhibition space and soliciting viewer engagement.
Nightwalker from Minny Lee on Vimeo.
Minny Lee Interviewed by Hyungjo Moon
ICP-Bard MFA Blog
February 26, 2016
Hyungjo Moon: Childhood memories seem to be a central part of your work. Why?
Minny Lee: I always thought that my childhood in South Korea was ordinary and there was not much to talk about. After spending a lot of time in the US, I realized that my childhood was unusual due to the tumultuous history of Korea at that time and the economic severity of my family in the midst of country’s industrialization. The most recent video I made was based on searching for my earliest memory when I was living in Daegu (a southern city in South Korea) with my grandmother and her mother-in-law. Growing up apart from my parents and siblings from age two to six and then reuniting with them and living in the countryside surrounded by nature influenced me as a person and an artist. Living on a farm on a foothill of mountain from age seven was a completely different experience. It was a quiet and self-sustaining life. I attempt to translate that experience through my paper cut-out work. Its contents reflect my time in the countryside, living closely with flowers, trees, bugs, stars, the sky, and stream.
From age eleven, I lived in Seoul—the capital of South Korea—and from that time, I started to be aware of government driven industrialization, military dictatorships, and democratic movements. Korea’s long Confucianism tradition taught me to respect elders and parents but at the same time, it was repressing the society at large. Living in a politically unstable country with Confucianism pressure, I had to escape somewhere. During high school, the answer was poetry and novels. Both my father and eight-grade teacher emphasized reading world classics. In my youth in Korea, reading was considered as a fundamental ability of the educated individual. I strongly responded to literature in particular and started to write poems during my high school years. My work would not be the same if I did not have literature growing up.
HM: For your solo thesis show, you will encourage visitors to handle your cut-out boxes to form images. On opening night, you will do a performance using cut-outs and storytelling. Why is evoking viewer participation so important to you?
ML: I am interested in creating an experience through an exhibition, by being thoughtful about utilizing the whole exhibition space and inviting viewer participation. It frustrates me when objects in museums and galleries get overly protected by barricades and guards. I understand preservation issues and market values but when an artwork is treated more importantly than visitor observation and enjoyment (whom the work is made for and addressed to), I feel there is a loss of morality.
I like to let people touch my work and awaken different senses such as seeing, hearing, touching, and smelling. Sensing can evoke the viewer’s memory. I made cutouts on a vellum paper and attached them to a black box on one end while leaving the other end open. One can see the content of cutouts when shining the box with a flashlight. They are fragments of my childhood memories but I hope that viewers can form mental pictures of their own childhood memories. This possibility of connections and expansions makes me excited and motivates me to work in a participatory practice.
HM: You often title your photograph with the name of the place you took the photo. What significance does the place have in your photography?
ML: I took my first photography class in the fall of 1999. One day the teacher took us to a Bill Brandt (1904-1983) exhibition at ICP Museum. It was the first time I saw so many great photographs gathered in one place. While Brandt was experimenting with abstractions and surrealism with photography, he was mainly a photojournalist working for print media. Brandt’s generation and the generation after him titled photographs with subject, place, and year. Richard Avedon was not considered as a documentary photographer but he also titled the same way. One of his titles would read: Marian Anderson, contralto, New York, June 30, 1955. I studied Documentary Photography and Photojournalism Studies at ICP School from 2007 to 2008 and learned a great deal about the importance of captions, which provide context to the viewer. Being in a specific place at a specific time means something. Clicking the shutter release one second earlier or one second later can make a huge difference. If you look at Robert Frank’s contact sheets from The Americans or Richard Avedon’s contact sheets of sittings with models, you will understand how crucial the timing is, in addition to the specific place and specific situation they are in. I often include the place and year in my title because it provides both the least and most information I can provide to the viewer without imposing any further meaning to the picture.
HM: It seems that trees are your main subject matters and walking is an important method of making work.
ML: I started to photograph trees since 2008 after realizing my interest in trees, which has a lot to do with living in nature during my childhood. In terms of walking, it comes from my early training in photography—from street photography to documentary photography. New York has a great tradition in street photography and you get to see a lot if you live in New York. With street photography, a photographer has to be in right place and right time and be ready when interesting thing happens. My approach is more about discovery of wonder—being a visual poet with a camera. In documentary photography, a photographer pursues the same subject matter for a long time by returning to the same people and place. I tend to walk a lot when making work but I also like to return to the same place many times to have deeper explorations. Walking is a strange exercise. I can be completely mindful of myself or completely open to observations of the world. Unexpected encounters make walking worthwhile. A work becomes more interesting when an artist’s introspection collide with the outer world.
HM: Making artist books has been important part of your practice. Do you see your book as an object in itself?
ML: An artist book is an intimate medium to invite viewers to experience my work. I like small books that people can hold in their hands. A book consists of a sequence of pages and therefore it is a time-based medium. I can intend to lead the viewer in a certain way by sequencing and designing the book but each viewer will experience and react to the book differently due to their diverse backgrounds and histories. I make a book as an object because I pay great attention to materials and details. However, I don’t want to revere book as a precious object and display it inside of glass vitrine. Books should be experienced through close physical contact and that’s why I still like to read traditionally printed books. When I was making books last March, I thought that I could just make books for the rest of my life and be happy forever after.
Paola Núñez Solorio of Tracking Art featured images and Q&A on encounters series.
Conversation with Minny Lee
Tracking Art (November 21, 2011)
How did you start with Encounters?
The first image came about due to a class assignment at ICP while I was a student of the One-Year Documentary and Photojournalism Program in 2008. The assignment was to read an article about “Sleep” and to make an image to accompany the article. I had a vivid pre-visualization of what I wanted to photograph: the feeling of falling trees during twilight hours on a rainy day. I liked the results from that exercise but I didn’t continue as I was pursuing documentary photography. In October 2008, I met Italian photographer, Giorgia Fiorio. She encouraged me to continue photographing trees after seeing my tree pictures. Giorgia made me realize that I don’t have to limit my photography to any genres or subject matters. Instead it is important to pursue where my interests lie.
Can you talk a little about your childhood? In particular, can you describe briefly how your childhood is reflected in the project?
I was born during South Korea’s industrialization period. Both of my parents worked and it was hard for them to take care of both my sister and I. They sent me to my paternal grandmother from age 2 to 6. This event changed my life forever. When I reunited with my family, I felt alienated. When I was 7, my family moved to the countryside and that’s when I started interacting with nature. My father built a house on a hill and made beautiful gardens. I looked at the natural settings and observed how things changed over time. Later in my life, I lived in big cities but my affinity towards nature always remained inside of me. When I began the Encounters project, I felt happy to be able to connect with nature again.
Trees are the main subjects of this project. What do you find so appealing about them?
Nature has a lot of elements: trees, flowers, animals, rocks, water, wind, etc. When I began my project, I decided to first concentrate on trees as trees alone is a huge subject. When I started photographing trees, I realized that each tree has its own personality and character just like human beings. I am attracted to those trees with character but I am also attracted to small elements in nature. I am fascinated by how well trees adjust to natural environments. I also think trees express feelings by the shaping of roots, trunks, branches, and leaves.
In your artist statement, you wrote, “I am interested in the coexistence between absence and presence, past and present and dream and reality.” Is this something that you are intentionally looking for? Can you talk a little bit about it?
When I photograph, it is more of natural discovery of these things rather than looking for them intentionally. They coexist without defined lines. We don’t always live in the present and in reality. We constantly go back and forth between the past and present and dream and reality. From the absence of something, I can imagine the presence of something. When I am photographing, I am constantly revisiting different time and place and that makes photographing more interesting.
How important is the final presentations of your images? What kind of methods have you used to present Encounters series?
For me, how I show my images in their final forms is very important. So the thinking process doesn’t stop at making or editing images but continues to the end of the “life of images.” When presenting my photographs, the viewers’ physical and direct experience with my images is important for me. For formal presentation, I mount the pictures bleeding to the edge. I prefer 40”x50” size in order to overwhelm viewers and make them feel like they are standing in front of real trees. I also presented an installation with prints hanging from the ceiling, moving to and fro due to an electric fan, and sounds of nature that I recorded during different seasons and times. When the viewers entered into the space, I wanted them to feel like they entered into a forest. I feel that photographs can evoke many different senses, not just visual sense.
In Praise of Trees
The contents of some of her writings and the thematic range of her work emphasize Minny Lee’s logical connection to an artistic approach inspired by Asian visual traditions. She often cites the work of Chinese photographer Don Hong-Oai as a reference, but we could also mention that of another Chinese photographer, Lang Jingshan, whose work is characterized by a certain pictorialism, though this term is usually reserved for Western photography. In any case, both express their attachment to nature, and trees are central figures in their vision of the landscape. Minny Lee has said that from her earliest childhood, when she lived in the country, she observed the natural world around her on a daily basis. Surely the solitude she has described, coupled with a rather reserved personality, have led her to look carefully at the natural landscape. While her approach is not scholarly, she does, however, pay close attention to the seasonal changes in plants. It seems that this world whose life she observes interests her much more than her human surroundings, taking over her mind and giving rise to an artistic calling. Photography has clearly been a way of translating her experience. Trees have become practically the single theme of her work, the main character in a story that she has dedicated herself to composing in images. It’s not an exaggeration to call trees characters in this context – with personalities or inner lives – since in her eyes trees move, vibrate, and communicate, and her images translate the range of feelings that this observation inspires. She works at distilling these forms, which are never the same from one photograph to the next. She emphasizes certain seasons and certain light conditions that correspond to her vision: winter, when trees are bare and their silhouettes reach upwards in a motion that looks like calligraphy, and twilight, when trees stand out against a colorful sky. Through this approach, which consists in very methodically exploring the figure of the tree in its various aspects, we can identify in Minny Lee’s work a kind of connection with aesthetic concepts of Western art. Indeed, it’s hard not to think of the principle of variations on a theme which, in painting as well as music, has known many incarnations, from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations to Claude Monet’s cathedrals.
In this way, Minny Lee’s work seems to express reactions, concerns, and inspirations that are related to the fact that she has lived in the United States for a long time now. For example, these artistic influences can be read in her way of handling color: each image is based on a range of monochromatic shades and the dominant tone varies from one tree to another. Yet this doesn’t mean that Minny Lee explores the entire color spectrum: she often plays with tones that are dull and even dark – in all the meanings of the word. This way of taking photos creates an atmosphere reminiscent of dreams, and the delicately-created sensations of movement and blurriness accentuate this impression. It’s also noticeable in her work that she uses the entire surface of the photograph bordered by the frame, filling up the space with colored matter without leaving any blanks. This practice also distances her somewhat from ideas of representation in Asian visual art. And then, of course, there’s the composition, which is organized around a limited number of elements: the tree and almost nothing else. It’s a bit like the painter Giorgio Morandi not leaving his studio and always painting the same objects around him. There are photographers who travel the globe in search of new subjects, and then there are those who operate in a limited territory, slowly discovering depth and fulfillment at their own pace, by staying near the same subjects. Minny Lee clearly belongs to this second category. In her eyes, the nature surrounding her is an endless source of new events.
Gabriel Bauret (Curator)
(Gabriel Bauret’s article accompanied Minny Lee’s solo exhibition at Gallery Now in Seoul, South Korea in January 2015. It is included in her artist book, encounters, published by Datz Press.)