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Artist Ji Lee was born in Korea, raised in Brazil and is currently resides in a New York. Lee’s itinerant past seems apropos given that he recently began a new body of work called “Parallel Worlds” — tiny dioramas of often simple domestic interiors installed in the most unexpected places: ceilings, the areas under stairs, and spaces easily overlooked in specific environments. Best known for his blank speech bubble stickers slapped over street advertising, the artists often claims “dead space” — space overlooked by passersby be it ubiquitous, ignored advertising or ceilings — with the goal of confronting and delighting viewers in surprising ways.

Lee explains to Theme how he hijacks “dead space” and how his teenage daydreams inspired his diorama for “Small is Beautiful.”

Talk about your interest in “dead space” and how that resulted in your “Parallel Worlds” series.
Dead space exists everywhere around us, from our office to our living space. Most people decorate their walls and floors with furniture and carpets, but ceilings — with the exception of fans or lights — are often left bare. The funny thing is that ceilings have been historically an active space for artists, churches, and architects. But with modernism, that space got lost.

I’m also interested in spaces like the backs of business cards. For the most part, you design a business card and pay attention to only the front, and leave the back blank. I try to use these spaces in a creative way. People get to look at this space more often, when they find something in these space, it’s a little bit of a surprise.

I see a connection between your Talking Bubble Project and the “Parallel Worlds” series — both have a double-take moment, in the case of the Talking Bubble, when you see something funny and ironic coming out the mouth of a bland actor from the poster, and when I see something suspended upside down on the ceiling.
Both have an unexpectedness — advertising on the street is so ubiquitous and so familiar and so intricately tied to our everyday that we blank it out. The same goes for ceilings — we don’t really look at it. By hijacking these two things and adding a little twist to it, it completely changes the way we look at it.

How did In Between your piece for “Small is Beautiful” begin?
Theme invited me to participate in the “Small is Beautiful” and originally, I thought I would make another “Parallel Worlds” piece for the exhibition, but when I went to visit the gallery for a walkthrough, I was drawn to the window space of the gallery. It didn’t make sense to put a “Parallel World” on the ceiling in the space window — the windows were too high and you wouldn’t see it from the street level. I wanted to use the space in the window as an active space, to create a room in the window.

As a teenager, when I would start to fall asleep — in that in-between stage of being asleep and awake — I would have this strange sensation that my body was growing. I felt my body was inflating, that I was going to float in the air. I became really huge and like that Magritte painting of the big apple in the room, there was something really fascinating about scale and body versus the small objects in the room. That was the starting point of my idea for teh Small is Beautiful installation. In that room in the window space, there will be large boy with a small head sitting in a room of small furniture. He’ll probably have long hair with his back to the window. He’s like crouching in an uncomfortable position, kind of melancholy, perhaps he’s been sitting there for a really long time while hair grew long and everything around him became smaller.

I want to convey the personality of the person in this room through the furniture and decoration. Perhaps there’s a guitar, there’s some turntables, and maybe there’s a mirror in front of him. There’s a shift of scale and I want viewers to ask the question: Is this guy huge or is everything really small? The viewer is invited to be a voyeur in this shift of reality.

Where did your fascination with miniatures come from?
I’m Asian, and space in Asia is very limited. Places like Japan and Korea are small countries with large populations and due to this there’s the cult of miniaturization in those countries. Growing up as a Korean, I got used to seeing lots of small things. I wanted to play with this scale, something small getting big, something small getting big.

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Theme has teamed up with Scion to curate an exhibition of miniature dioramas by artists Jeremy Mora, Lori Nix, Tracey Snelling, Dan Funderburgh and Ji Lee. Asked to interpret the theme “Small is Beautiful” the five artists constructed mini cities, colored and inspired by their own experiences of urban life, touching on topics of decay, regeneration, voyeurism, multiculturalism, chaos and order.