Today we’d like to introduce you to Bora Kyung Min Lee.
Bora Kyung, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
I am originally from Seoul and moved to Northern New Jersey when I was 12. Growing up near NYC with parents who routinely visited art museums and theaters introduced me to Broadway musicals. It was the lightening moment seeing Julie Taymor’s animal puppets march down to “Circle of Life” in The Lion King Musical that sparked my commitment to scenic design pretty early on.
I then moved to LA and studied under the mentorship of Shannon Scrofano and Chris Barreca at California Institute of the Arts, learning what it means to design space that isn’t static but progresses through time and action. My interest range grew to include puppetry, collage-making, projection design, and eventually film.
Producing and designing a musical feature in my last year of undergrad opened up my horizons and made me realize that the process that I enjoy so much in performance such as script analysis, research, and aesthetic direction applies to so many more mediums.
I then began collaborating with a rock and roll band called My Boyfriend as their creative director. I translate their musical aesthetic into visuals (posters, album covers, photoshoots), and the process is very similar to designing an opera!
It’s been a great year letting go of my impatience. All throughout school, I felt like I needed to claim a field and pledge allegiance to it and to no other mediums. It was a constant struggle of “ok do I go into designing music videos? Or theme parks? Pop concerts?” without knowing anything. But once I’ve let go of that mindset, the doors opened up in all these different worlds, and my process has remained the same. Since then I’ve worked in fashion shoots, commercials, pop tours, short films, and stop motion animation, and it’s been really really fun 🙂
We’d love to hear more about your work. What do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
I’m a production designer for film, performance, and live spectacle. I freelance in art department for commercial and film and work part-time at a concert design studio called Metaform. And in my free time, I produce and do production design for independent films and stop motion animation!
In whichever medium, diagnosing the intent of the work always happens in dialogue with its author, director, and fellow collaborators. Once we settle on a set of objectives, then it’s my job to visually communicate it in different forms such as research, sketching, 3D modeling, digital rendering, to architectural model-building.
I’m interested in psychological space that marks progression in story arc/character dynamics/ or pop star’s brand aspirations. I’m still trying to figure out what distinguishes psychological design from the merely pictorial.
Space is an umbrella idea that concerns every element that makes experience. And I want to be a designer who has the sensitivity to regard the most granular details about what makes a stadium stage or a bedroom so personal to its actors while creating beautiful images. Most memorable quote by my teacher is “it’s not ‘your set’ that you’re designing, it’s the actor’s world.” Meaning, it’s not some grand, architectural statement you’re posing with your set design, but world-making for whoever inhabits it.
Do current events, local or global, affect your work and what you are focused on?
Fascist regimes and military dictatorships have always existed, and I’m not sure if the role of art in America has changed particularly under the current administration. However, with the sunrise movement championing the Green New Deal which brings economic, racial, environmental, gender, etc causes altogether under one goal of fighting human extinction, there’s been workshops and lectures specifically for artists to use their skills to make the movement’s work more theatrical and visible. Much like the movement of ACT UP did in the 80’s. I’m not sure if art-making alone discharges a civic responsibility. But art-making in participation of protest, not as an artist but as a citizen, undoubtedly does.
My work doesn’t have an outwardly political agenda. I design personal narratives. But I follow national and international politics daily. The nuclear arms race between Koreas, China, Russia, and US scares me. Climate change scares me. I find that stuff that affects me personally manifests in my work somehow. Additionally, all my personal work is done with close collaborators, and although we do not advertise our work within the terms of identity politics, our cast and crew have always been POC-run. And our identity is not a blind coincidence, but an organic consequence of the creative team being non-white and queer.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
I share my work on my Instagram (@borakyungmin_) and my website (www.borakyungmin.com).
I’m currently working on a short film with my partner and hoping to screen it as a short + feature with a musical film that we’ve made called The Real Moments. Stay tuned !!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.borakyungmin.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @borakyungmin_
- Other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTAswNxmhnQ
Image Credit:
Personal photo taken by Richard Sue
First image the poster (Directed by Jon Paul Arciniega, Poster Design by Christina Huang)
Second image the band photo (Directed by Jon Paul Arciniega, Lighting Design by Pei Yu Lai)
Third image with overhead projection (Directed by Chris Williams and Natalia Lassalle)
Fifth image the play with masks (Co-written and directed by Bora Kyung Min Lee and Colin Yeo).
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