Edge Rewrite
everything Source code View original
// HTMLRewriter · presentation

This page was redesigned at the edge.

Cloudflare fetched the original article and streamed it through HTMLRewriter to apply an entirely new visual system without rebuilding the source page.

// request.cf · coarse context

A page that knows where it met you.

Only coarse request metadata is shown. This demo does not display or persist visitor IP addresses.

Country
US
Cloudflare location
CMH
Connection
HTTP/2
Language
Not provided

Ray ID: a2506bfcbd2df689

Jump to content

Draft:Ahree Lee

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Based in Los Angeles, Korean-American artist Ahree Lee (b. July 28, 1971) works in videos, textiles, new media, and photography. Her work sits at the intersection of craft and technology.

The artist first came to international attention in 2007 when Apple founder Steve Jobs demonstrated YouTube on Apple TV at the D5 Conference, "All Things Digital," using her video montage work Me: Girl takes pic of herself every day for three years (2001-ongoing), a work she began in graduate school.[1][2] It consists of more than 1,000 images of herself shot with a Nikon digital camera between November 2001 and 2004.[3] When this work was nominated for a Webby Film and Video Awards in the "Best Experimental" category, the press release called her "poised for online stardom."

Lee has since innovated in the area of textile data visualizations. She has translated data points that correspond to her own use of time, or the decline in the percentage of female students earning bachelor's degrees in computer science, into small-scale tapestries that make larger points about perceptions of women's labor or their once-central place in early computing.[4]

Early Life and Education

Raised in suburban Philadelphia, Lee attended Yale University (Class of 1993), where she majored in English. As told to LA Weekly's Shana Nys Dambrot, it was making signage at a summer library job that she realized her talent for graphic design. Upon graduation, she worked in the graphic design field for several years and then returned to Yale, where she earned her MFA in graphic design from the Yale School of Art.[5]

Notable Works

Many of Lee's works have engaged her Korean heritage. She has reinterpreted the traditional Korean technique of quilting with fabric scraps to produce wrapping clothes (bojagi) through a technological lens. In Bojagi (Memories to Light) (2015), Lee "stiches together found footage of mid-century Asian American home movies into a luminous, kinetic bojagi, honoring histories often left unseen...."[6] The Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco included this work in the group show Video Craft (February 28-August 16, 2026). She returned to this subject again in Bojagi (Shades of L.A.), which fuses this tradition with patterns that represent African American Gee's Bend, Alabama, quilters. This digital work honors the diverse communities that have resided in Los Angeles's Leimert Park neighborhood and was on view in the K Line Leimert Park Metro Station as part of Metro Art's "Love Leimert" installation.[7]

Bojagi (Memories to Light) was among several works that opened the Mentoring the Next Generation Conference in 2016, which was co-sponsored by Berkeley Law's Korea Law Center (University of California) and the Council of Korean Americans. A featured speaker, Lee reflected on her Korean-American identity for the benefit of young professionals.[8]

Commissions

Her many commissions include the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the 01SJ Biennial, the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, the 2006 International Short Film Festival in Leuven, Belgium; the International Festival of Video Art of Casablanca and the Sundance Channel.[9]

Controversy

Already in circulation at film festivals, Lee's work Me achieved widespread attention immediately upon being uploaded to YouTube on August 11, 2006. Jill Walker Rettberg of the University of Bergen notes that its introduction via YouTube "gave it an entirely different kind of life as the start of a new genre."[10] Photographer Noah Kalina stumbled upon her video, which inspired him to create a montage of the daily snapshots he had taken for six years, which he uploaded to YouTube a little over two weeks after Lee had shared her video on this platform. One author concludes, "Without the force of competition from Lee, the project never would have been transformed into something that would help his career."[11] His viral popularity overshadowed her achievement as the creator of the "first digital video portrait."[12] An essay published in 2021 ranked her as the fourth to commence a time-lapse self-portrait form ("proto-selfie"), just behind Kalina.[13]

References

[edit]

[14]

  1. ^ "Artist Gallery Talk: Ahree Lee". USC Pacific Asia Museum. 2021. Retrieved July 20, 2026.
  2. ^ Rettberg, Jill Walker (2014). Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves. England: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 36. ISBN 978-1-349-99539-4.
  3. ^ Schneider, Keith (March 18, 2007). "Look at Me, World! Self-Portraits Morph Into Internet Movies". New York Times. Retrieved July 20, 2026.
  4. ^ Reizman, Renee (October 23, 2019). "A Tribute to Women's Work, From Weaving to Computer Programming". Hyperallergic. Retrieved July 20, 2026.
  5. ^ Dambrot, Shana Nys (September 23, 2019). "Meet an Artist Monday: Ahree Lee". LA Weekly.
  6. ^ "Museum of Craft and Design (video posted to Instagram)". April 12, 2026. Retrieved July 20, 2026.
  7. ^ ""Love Leimert," Bojagi (Shades of L.A.)". Metro Art.
  8. ^ "Mentoring the Next Generation Conference 2016 (Conference Program)" (PDF). Berkeley Law, University of California. 2016.
  9. ^ "Conference Program, Mentoring the Next Generation Conference" (PDF). Berkeley Law, University of California. 2016. Retrieved July 20, 2026.
  10. ^ Rettberg, Jill Walker (2014). Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves. England: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 36. ISBN 978-1-349-99539-4.
  11. ^ Belsky, Scott (2010). Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles between Vision and Reality. New York, New York: Penguin Group. ISBN 978-1-59184-312-2.
  12. ^ Schneider, Keith (March 18, 2007). "Look at Me, World! Self-Portraits Morph Into Internet Movies". New York Times. Retrieved July 20, 2026.
  13. ^ Tasman, Marc A. (May 2021). "Race for the Prize: The Proto-Selfie as Endurance Performance Art". Ace Lehner, ed. Self-Representation in an Expanded Field: From Self-Portraiture to Selfie, Contemporary Art in the Social Media Age: 87.
  14. ^ "Artist Gallery Talk: Ahree Lee". USC Pacific Asia Museum. 2020. Retrieved July 20, 2026.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Ahree_Lee&oldid=1365252708"