Janjaa (Helen Sungmin Lee)
Janjaa (Helen Sungmin Lee) is a research-based interdisciplinary artist primarily working with sound, movement and installation, based in Chicago.
She builds structures that transmit sound through physical material, using exciter speakers, metal, and multichannel composition. She trained in violin for ten years before majoring in art. She is a Teaching Assistant in Digital Music, Department of Art and Technology / Sound Practices, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and gave the lecture "Treating Sound As An Artist" in that course. In 2026, she presented the paper "No pure sound: context, body, and the sonic object in contemporary art practice" at The Global Composition 2026, Connective Resonance for (Post)Human in Darmstadt/Dieburg. She organized Every Node Counts, a public workshop on Meshtastic mesh networking, and was a selected participant in DR AL, Relic Activation Performance Lab, at DFBRL8R, Chicago. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include Ubik Flow - a new formula at Hite Collection, Seoul, Triage at MANA Contemporary Chicago, and Traces of Movement at Kobun Gallery, Tokyo. She studied at Malmö Academy of Arts, Lund University, and holds a BFA from Korea National University of Arts. She is an MFA Sculpture candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating 2027.
Selected Works
Orbit and Phenomena, 2026, Installation with exciter speaker, reversed launching missile sound, manufactured metal plate, and wooden structures, dimensions variable.
How do we face a digital infrastructure that has no physical form to capture?
Orbit and Phenomena (2026) grows out of Janjaa (Helen S. Lee)'s research-based practice. The inspiration begins from the infinite scrolling process, a stretched timeline like the tail of a comet, falling, accelerating, and heating up.
R. Murray Schafer named the split between a sound and its source schizophonia. The artist extends the term to describe media that repetitively saturate the digital environment through self-replication, a visual environment of algorithmically circulated image and ambient screen. In this doubly saturated environment, the question is what still reaches the body, and where we are heading.
The installation builds an acoustic space with metal apparatuses that work as instruments through vibration. The pitch extracted sound sources are protest recordings from all over the world, selected for their connection to technological acceleration, surveillance, and warfare. Metal plates work as conductors for sound and as the visual implication of a shell of aerodynamic machinery.
Standing inside the structure, the audience becomes part of the receiving infrastructure. The body receives the sound before the mind resolves it. Over time, the repetitive sound psychologically blends into white noise, becoming the environmental background we are living in.
Untitled, 2026. Performance, 23 min, part of Triage at MANA Contemporary Chicago (DFBRL8R performance lab). Contact mic, stereo channel speaker, relics from From the Unspoken Between Feet and Head by Marcel Sparmann (2015). In collaboration with Alexia Bryan.
This performance is a research based artistic response to Marcel Sparmann's From the Unspoken Between Feet and Head, presented at Rapid Pulse Festival, Chicago, in 2015. The original work closed by proposing endings to the audience. This performance adds a fourth ending, bringing the relics of the 2015 work back to life. It begins from the ending scene of the previous performance and traces time backward through body movement and engagement. A contact mic attached to the body, together with a composed 'calling out' sound recalling the crowd of the original performance, serves as the movement score.
Above Footsteps, 2026. Multichannel sound, open for extension. Protest recordings captured first person on private devices, frequency analysis and extraction.
Above Footsteps works with sounds of protests related to technology acceleration and warfare, captured authentically from a first person perspective on private devices. Through frequency analysis and extraction, the work traces the patterns and howls of the protests, creating an echo across the room.
IN-anonymous, 2026. Looping sound work, 8 min 46 sec. Stereo.
IN-anonymous is a composed sound work in stereo, looping at 8 minutes 46 seconds. The piece mixes voice, field recording, synthesizer, and piano into a single continuous stream, each source folding into the others until its origin becomes uncertain.
Gigak Construction Journey, 2023, Installation involving ceramics, drawing, video projection with warp lens, round object attached with wooden hanger, acrylic panel with VLT film, wooden ramp, trampoline, 2 monitors and stereo sound system across space
The term Gigak(지각) in Korean has two meanings, 'perception' and 'Earth's crust.' In Gigak Construction Journey, these dual meanings are explored through the hyperconnectivity of perception, the neuron synapse phenomenon, and landscape, using the theme of a walk in a geological park. By magnifying the textures observed in the park, geological strata (gigak as Earth's crust) are overlaid with perceptual layers (gigak as perception), spatializing and visualizing the dual meaning inherently carried by the word. Throughout the installation, sound guides the audience through abstraction and inner state, resonating with the artist's vision of the walk.