If there’s a greater local oasis than Lake Michigan, I don’t know of it. The lake is infinite and free; go to it when in need of respite, or visit the Cultural Center to see “Jin Lee: Views & Scenes,” an understated knockout of a show featuring four photographic series, all attentive and devoted considerations of Chicago and its adjacent landscapes, including the lake but also sidewalk weeds, mountains of street salt and views from commuter trains. The exhibition is both a space of meditation in and of itself, and a provider of lessons on how to move through the city open to restorative observation, especially of its overlooked aspects. Partly this is about attitude, partly location, and ultimately some combination thereof.
Jin Lee, who has been taking pictures in and around Chicago since moving here in the mid-1980s to attend graduate school, was born in South Korea in 1961 and immigrated to Los Angeles with her family as a teenager. In 1996, she started teaching art at Illinois State University in Normal, eventually becoming a tenured professor, a job that has necessitated hundreds of weekly two-hour trips on the Amtrak line that runs between Chicago and Bloomington/Normal. This commute begot “Train View,” one of the series on display at the Cultural Center, and may it be an inspiration to commuters everywhere (or at least those not actively driving the vehicle they’re riding in).
The series is Lee’s largest and most diverse, not unsurprising given the miscellany of what’s laid out along this particular 150-mile journey: snowy farmland, patriotic warehouse signage, tangled forest, smoky oil refineries, low-income neighborhoods, a busy village center, mute storage units, random billboards, abandoned industrial buildings, placid brown rivers and streams, half-built real estate developments, a wind-swept cemetery, graffiti and more graffiti, an old prison tower and the quarry where inmates once worked, a horizon of wind turbines, endless utility lines. These places and non-places are seen in all seasons, weather, and times of day and night, maybe more than once. Differentiating one field from another can be tricky, but that’s part of the interest here. So is the very visibility of these sights, a unique consequence of train routes passing through territory that is often remote, private or otherwise inaccessible.
The degree to which any of these photos reveal that they have been shot from inside a train car varies. Some pictures have a pretty blurriness indicative of speed; others are so crisply focused, so symmetrically composed, it seems that the train must have slowed to a crawl or even stopped. (If you’ve ever ridden Amtrak, you know they do. How much less irksome that must be with camera in hand.) Then there are the outliers, a handful of photos of the train’s interior — a book of short stories held open by a hand, presumably the artist’s; a window made visible by drops of rain; a passenger who has fallen awkwardly asleep in the seat ahead — that not only remind the viewer of the genesis of this body of work, but also suggest the possibility of other sorts of voyages: literary, aesthetic, oneiric.
When not being taken on a set route, Lee takes herself, returning continually to a spot along the shoreline of Lake Michigan somewhere on the South Side. For the series “Great Water,” she shoots a similar picture every time: half sky, half water, so evenly bisected that the photographs in the gallery form a continuous horizon line, broken only by frames and wall space. It is impossible to fully represent something so immense and changeable, but Lee has done the lake justice by seeing it, truly seeing it, in so many of its states of being. Here is a wintry lake filled with little ice floes, clustered together like lily pads. There, in a pair of images that must have been taken moments apart, is the way the water color changes in an instant, going from juniper to sea foam, the effect of a cloud passing by the sun. Sometimes the horizon disappears completely, other times it reveals the steel mills in Gary, Indiana, or what appears to be a range of snow-capped peaks but is really an optical illusion caused by lake-effect clouds. Mostly, though, these 19 photographs — about half the series, which is ongoing — are filled with water and sky, waves and clouds, in a vaster array of hues and textures than even the most seasoned lake-goer would expect.
Where else does Lee go, what else is she looking at? Call it urban nature, those places where something exists that goes beyond human design, even as it is inextricably linked to it. The results are the series “Salt Mountain” and “Weed.” These feel like a hybrid of portrait and landscape photography, so intent are they on the particularities of their subjects, imbuing them with qualities of dignity, importance, beauty, resilience, age, occasionally to the point of anthropomorphism.
The mountains are those piles of road salt dumped around the city for winter ice management. In Lee’s pictures, which play with scale and framing, they’re sublime alpine ranges, summitting monumentally up above the tree line. The gross dirt of accumulated pollutants becomes an organic condition, the pathetic cracking and crumbling of small heaps an avalanche, the weird coloring of chemical additives a geological curiosity. Two of these massifs even evidence craggy facial forms, like the Old Man of the Mountain and other highland pareidolia. Who knew flat Chicago contained such picturesque vistas?
The weeds are found where they grow, in the crook where the pavement meets peeling white-painted wall. Those who can recognize such things will be able to identify yarrow, rue, plantain, dandelion and other hardy wild plants. There are inevitably some bits of trash and decomposing foliage on the ground because no one tends to such places. And yet, there is care in the kind of close and sustained looking that Lee practices — be it of sidewalk weeds, salt mountains, the lake or views from a commuter train. It’s not a judgmental kind of caring, full of helpful ideas for improvement of neglected sites; it’s just caring, plain and simple. Caring enough to notice that something is there, caring enough to see it and to appreciate it, as it is and beyond that, too. And to do so again and again.
“Jin Lee: Views & Scenes” runs through Aug. 7 at the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago Rooms, 2nd floor north, 78 E. Washington St.; free, more information at 312-744-5000 and chicago.gov
