Jinjoon Lee
Overview
Daejeon, Summer of 2023 at DIB Bangkok
Born in 1974, Korea
Lives and works in Korea, Japan, and the UK
Dr. Julian Jinjoon Lee FRSA MRSS is an artist-scholar and Data Gardenist whose work brings East Asian philosophical thought into dialogue with AI, data, and embodied perception. His theoretical framework, Gardenetics, proposes cultivation rather than control as an ethical alternative to cybernetic thinking.
After graduating from the Business School at Seoul National University in 2001, Lee went on to earn a BFA and MFA in Sculpture from the same university, followed by an MA from the Royal College of Art, London (2017), and a DPhil in Fine Art from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford (2021). His doctoral thesis, Empty Garden: A Liminoid Journey to Nowhere in Somewhere, took the form of a ten-metre hanji scroll interweaving East Asian garden aesthetics with existential philosophy and autoethnographic research. In 2026, the work entered the permanent collection of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, the Seoul Museum of Art, South London Gallery, Firstsite and ZKM Center for Art and Media. He was also selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2021. His work is held in permanent collections including MMCA, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, DIB International Contemporary Art Museum in Bangkok, and the Dubai International Financial Centre. He is also known for THEY (2010), a public media sculpture permanently installed in Sangam-dong DMC, Seoul; Cine-Forest: Awakening Bloom (2025), an outdoor media performance in Bundang that brought together two hundred professional singers, eight hundred AI vocal agents, a seventy-piece orchestra and a two-hundred-metre projection onto a forest; and Good Morning, Mr. G-Dragon (2025), which took G-Dragon's iris as source material, translated it through AI into a moving-image work, and transmitted it by satellite to a thirteen-metre antenna at KAIST's Space Institute.
Lee is Associate Professor at KAIST, where he is Founding Director of the Art & Technology Center and leads the TX Creative AI Lab. He is also Affiliate Professor at New York University, and Visiting Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford. Invited to ZKM Center for Art and Media's Hertz Lab in Karlsruhe as a guest artist in 2023, he received a full fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center in the United States the following year. He has been represented by Gallery BB&M in Seoul, where he presented a solo exhibition "Champagne Supernova" in 2025. His work proposes that the most pressing question of the data age is not how to build better archives, but how to tend better gardens.