Art / Juwon Lee 

:: Two Works :: 

 

lines in nyc, Digital collage using personal photos, 16” x 10.605

my first year(-ish) in NYC, Hand-drawn data visualization layered on top of a digital collage, 16” x 10.605

From the artist

 

:: Account ::

 

“In the City” is a self-reflec­tion series includ­ing a dig­i­tal col­lage (“lines in nyc”) and data visu­al­iza­tion piece (“my first year(-ish) in nyc”). I have always been inter­est­ed in col­lage work and data visu­al­iza­tion. Both of them have a unique pow­er to abstract the com­plex real­i­ty and pro­vide new per­spec­tives by nar­row­ing down the focus to spe­cif­ic ele­ments. Through this series, I want­ed to com­bine the two types of work to tell my sto­ry using my per­son­al images and data. 

“lines in nyc” is cre­at­ed by com­bin­ing per­son­al pho­tographs tak­en from my iPhone 11 Pro around New York City. By lay­er­ing and repo­si­tion­ing these images togeth­er, I aimed to recre­ate a dynam­ic yet geo­met­ric sur­face and to high­light some of the line ele­ments that soothed me in this bustling city. “my first year(-ish) in nyc” is a sim­ple hand-drawn data visu­al­iza­tion piece—inspired by Gior­gia Lupi’s “data human­ism” principles—layered on top of the “lines in nyc” to look back on my first year of liv­ing in New York City. 

In ret­ro­spect, mov­ing to NYC post­grad was not as glam­orous as I expect­ed it to be. Liv­ing alone for the first time and work­ing remote­ly for my new cor­po­rate job in my stu­dio apartment—and all of it dur­ing a pandemic—became more chal­leng­ing than I had antic­i­pat­ed. At times, I felt over­whelmed, lost, and lone­ly by the extreme hus­tle and bus­tle atmos­phere of the city. 

Amidst the chaos, I found my peace through dis­cov­er­ing order in geo­met­ric ele­ments in the streets and build­ings, which is my inspi­ra­tion behind the “lines in nyc” col­lage. I also took advan­tage of my liv­ing and remote work envi­ron­ment by hav­ing friends come vis­it and spend­ing some time out­side of the city as show­cased in “my first year(-ish) in nyc” piece. 

To cre­ate this data visu­al­iza­tion, I gath­ered all data col­lec­tions from my cal­en­dar, pho­to album, texts, emails, and trav­el tick­ets since the day I moved to New York in ear­ly 2021. I divid­ed up the find­ings into four main cat­e­gories: spe­cial dates, days I left NYC, days I had vis­i­tors from out of town, and days I went into the office. To main­tain the geo­met­ric theme of the col­lage and to embody New York City’s grid-plan sys­tem, I orga­nized the entire visu­al­iza­tion in a grid lay­out with ver­ti­cal axis rep­re­sent­ing days and hor­i­zon­tal axis rep­re­sent­ing months. Each day is iden­ti­fied by a sim­ple white dot, and those spe­cial cat­e­go­ry dates are illus­trat­ed by dif­fer­ent sym­bols and col­ors. If there’s been a change, such as a dif­fer­ent city or vis­i­tor right after one anoth­er, this change is sig­ni­fied by anoth­er line drawn on top of the ini­tial mark.

Juwon Lee is a human-cen­tered design­er and a cre­ative based in New York City. She has expe­ri­ence in both print and web design and is pas­sion­ate about projects that require human-cen­tered design think­ing, vision, and a high degree of craft. She has expe­ri­ence in in-house pro­duc­tion + graph­ic design, agency design, design stu­dio project lead, and cor­po­rate user-cen­tered design. She received her BFA in Graph­ic and Infor­ma­tion Design from North­east­ern Uni­ver­si­ty in Boston, MA and is cur­rent­ly pur­su­ing her MFA in Design & Tech­nol­o­gy at Par­sons School of Design.

juwon-lee.com