Atelier JAK

Lee & Bae is pleased to present the opening of its first New York space with Soul Blindness – Not Quite, a solo exhibition by the artist duo Atelier JAK (Jangyoung Jung and Andreas Geisselhardt). The exhibition inaugurates the gallery's Chelsea location and marks the New York debut of the duo's long-form project Soul Blindness. Soul Blindness is conceived as a single 90-minute narrative divided into thirty sequences of exactly three minutes each, with every sequence realized in a different medium: film, a stop-motion machine built from 540 resin cubes, spatial installation. The present exhibition is the project's third sequence, and it begins from an attempt to translate cinema into space. Here the film no longer stays on the screen. Slowly rotating sculptures, structures suspended in air, translucent green filters, light and shadow, and the visitor's own movement together compose the scene. At the center of the space, a large rotating structure translates the emotional flow of the scenario into shifting color and form; one hundred storyboard images arranged within it are cast by light into shadows that spread across the walls and floor, surrounding the viewer. Beyond a green filter, a second rotating sculpture converts the story's scenes and events into direct images and objects. From one position the two structures appear fully separate; from another they overlap into a single image. No position reveals the whole. The work's point of departure is visual agnosia, the neurological condition of seeing without recognizing. The installation does not set out to describe a disorder; it asks how perception is formed between seeing and knowing. Where JAK cannot recognize what is visible, the viewer does the opposite, finding pattern and connection in forms that resist identification, an impulse the artists link to apophenia. Atelier JAK calls the territory where these movements meet the Zwischenraum, the in-between space: not a place where difference disappears, but where different systems collide, coexist, and generate meaning that never settles into a single form. "We almost recognize. But not quite." At a certain moment, the viewer no longer watches JAK. The viewer becomes JAK.

Atelier JAK is a collective project group formed in 2008 by Jangyoung Jung and Andreas Geisselhardt. Drawing upon their distinct nationalities and cultural experiences, their work inherits the mid-20th-century conceptual art tradition and the formal experimentation of 1960s minimalism. Concurrently, it carries contemporary significance by addressing new ontological questions of the digital age. They have participated in various residency programs, including Germany's Neustart Kultur (2021–2022), and their artworks are held in the permanent collections of numerous major institutions, such as the German Federal Government, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan. In 2025, they solidified their artistic standing with an invited solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen (Art Museum Reutlingen) in Germany.