Hyungjin Lee: Award-Winning Animator on the Preservation of Life
Coloring in the world of her life, Korean animator and storyteller Hyungjin Lee takes bottles of colors and paints her canvas with shades of memories. From pigmented blues to hazy pinks, every hue details a spectrum of stories and dreams that become preserved under her artistic care. She dips her brush into a seemingly intangible source of history — her life experiences, generational memories, and emotions that will never fade from the thief of time. With various accolades from multiple film festivals and global recognition for her animated works, Lee’s animations are inherently timeless, embracing the ever-lasting warmth and depth of emotional connection that transcends generations.
With a nod towards traditional animation, Lee herself stands in as a protector of analog art, a nostalgic but potent style that commercial animation’s CGI and 3D animation cannot hope to replace. She starts with a blank canvas — the beginnings of an infinite array of possibilities that stretch beyond physicality. Rejecting limitations and restrictions that other mediums may heavily impose, her potential to create with art and animation is limitless. With passion surging beneath her fingertips, Hyungjin Lee wrote to EnVi over email to walk down memory lane — weaving together the thin threads of the everlasting, the thick ropes of family, and the braids of emotions.
Art, Animation, and Analog
Stories have always been a life-long companion to Lee. Spinning tales and relaying stories was a childhood favorite, as her younger self enjoyed “making someone feel something through [how she delivered stories].” Naturally, she progressed into pursuing storytelling as an art form, enticed by the longevity of a story’s life through a more tangible medium.
Pivoting to films as her answer, she went to college in Rhode Island with a blazing desire to expand on stories. She could feel it — the start of her budding storytelling career. Unlike her high hopes, her vision quickly got shot down when she stumbled upon an ill-fated roadblock: casting. Tasked with a mission that felt far beyond her student means, building a full-fledged cast was out of the question. Having to quickly improvise a viable solution, the career-changing turning point led to animation. With animation, she could “tell stories without constrictions of cast, language, or budget.” Now, far beyond her student days, she relishes the ability to fully express herself through art and animation, teasing about “going into overdrive” if she wasn’t allowed to.
Lee’s works embrace time as a construct. From generational memories to a non-linear creative process, time is artistically relative. Her creative process starts off by getting hit with “an intense desire to visualize,” accumulating heaps of storyboards while drafting. “I’ll animate the first scene/image/movement that I’m excited about, and that first piece usually inspires other scenes,” she explained. “From there, it’s a lot of editing, switching orders, and playing around with colors, sounds, and textures, trying to figure out the visual, sonic world that this story lives in.”
For many artists, this creative process is grueling, taking a long time to complete. Artists grip their tools, redo their strokes, and sometimes, start all over again. Yet, Lee appreciates this complex, time-consuming process all the same. Sincerity drips from Lee’s words, as she explains that she enjoys it “because she gets to spend so much time ruminating in her memories, emotions, and dreams.” That time spent ruminating isn’t a waste, however. It’s reflected in the textures and layers of her animations. While she didn’t claim that to be her secret ingredient, perhaps that’s the reason behind the captivating depth to her animations — the layer of emotional sincerity that she places on her canvas as a foundation.
Inheritance: Forevermore
For many of Lee’s animations, family remains at the forefront of her mind. She moved to the United States alone at 14, separated from her family and community for most of her young life. Looking around her, she found nuclear families, a family unit long lost to her. Solidifying the thread of family in her mind, she clung onto the memories that had strung it together. Then, the thread frayed further when her grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Her grandmother became the inspiration behind Inheritance (2023), a tale of two women forever intertwined: her grandmother and herself.
With a piercing whistle in the background and a soft, heavy narration that envelops the background audio, a large part of the film is dripped in a heavy haze. Whether it’s from the blurriness of the loss of memories or the growing distance between the two women, it’s a bittersweet film. “[My grandmother] struggles to recognize me and often forgets my name. But when she looks at me, she always smiles and strokes my hand, and there’s something sparkling in her eyes that tells me she loves me with so much clarity,” Lee shared. “I wanted to tell a story of her love, which I believe lives in a place beyond her deteriorating memory and all the obstacles between us.”
Winning Best Experimental Film at the Korea International Short Film Festival, the short film is slow at times, a whirlwind at others, and sometimes, a blur of emotions that captures the confusion and grief of slowly losing someone you love. Despite its occasional visual simplicity, its emotional complexity is steadfast. The yearning from both women, cocooned in blurry hands and shaky smiles, speaks to the mirrors of human emotion that are love and loss.
The screen flashes and flutters with gray blurs, pink streaks, and black outlines, but her grandmother’s figure remains as the underlying centerpiece of the film. Although she eventually fades from view, she lingers as a distant reminder of who Lee is grieving. To that, Lee expresses her desire to comfort others who have or are experiencing the same sense of loss, recognizing the beauty in “sharing the most vulnerable, personal piece of [herself and] hoping the film provides a kind of catharsis [that helped] release years of grief, longing, and guilt that [she] was unable to process for a long time.”
The ROUGHCUT’s of Life
While many artists and creators are inclined to deliver the perfected, final cuts of their work, Lee is wholeheartedly open to sharing the “rough cuts” of her life, underscoring the struggles, the mishaps, and the work in progress moments that prelude the final product. Creating ROUGHCUT, a newsletter that she writes about “how the oddly shaped bones, joints, and skin of a story come together in the most unsightly, beautiful, and frustrating ways,” she openly reveals another hidden story behind her art — her own.
Aside from the creative process, she pens out an unpolished yet completely sincere version of herself in diaristic entries. It’s eye-opening, introspective, and relatable all at once, both to her creations and the mysterious entity behind the art itself. Breaking down the fourth wall between creator and viewer, Lee has created a space for other artists and viewers to read, rest, and relate. “I found so much comfort in reading about other artists’ messy artistic processes because it helps me feel like I’m not alone when I’m struggling,” she expressed. “Because of this, I wanted to create a space where I share the personal, messy, slow behind the scenes of my artistic process.”
Yet, having to be vulnerable in front of the world is a difficult challenge, with Lee pointing out how frightening it is to write about deeply autobiographical thoughts and experiences in an online space. Nevertheless, she perseveres if only to “cultivate a culture where we can openly, unashamedly talk about our struggles with mental health.” Proudly contributing to this open culture, where she familiarizes readers with societally smothered topics, she has shared her own experiences with anxiety, burnout, and even finding one’s place in life. She’s marched on, battling her own fears to comfort herself and in turn, others, with an additional bonus of strong support from her readers.
Upcoming: Stay With Me
Inspired by her own personal journey in moving abroad at a young age, Stay With Me is an upcoming film that will feature a protagonist that “finds a metaphorical home, constantly oscillating between states of belonging and non-belonging.” Hoping to speak to the diasporic community with this new film, Lee aims to tell a story about homes, whether it exists abroad, in several locations, or even, within.
“My creative process… taught me to find beauty and depth in emotions we usually avoid, like grief, anxiety, and anger,” she fervently expressed. “And for all this, I am very grateful for my artistic practice and that I have the privilege of continuing to tell stories.” So, she creates — fiercely, emotionally, and lovingly. With the art of storytelling at her disposal, Lee has colored in a path of her own, penciling in the gravity of transparency, resilience, and art as the preservation of life’s memories.
To find more information about Hyungjin Lee’s artistic process, check out her official website and Instagram. For more information on her animated works, check out her collection on Vimeo.
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