Seungjin Lee & Dalton Portella

0:02:09 – SEUNGJIN LEE
KEW GARDENS NY USA

New York based artist and organizer of DigiAna Group. Seungjin Lee uses multi-sensory digital and analog media to create works that focus on the cultural intersections between human-felt experience and a virtually-impelled world. Lee was born in South Korea, spent his formative years following his parents as they repeatedly moved between Japan and South Korea, and received his BFA from Tama Art University Japan. Academically minded, Lee’s parents exposed him to the traditional arts of Korea and Japan as well as to literature and music (the analog). While constant change in culture, location, education systems, urban landscape, and language provided Lee with a wealth of information to consume and to learn from, it also left him confused and conflicted and without a sense of national or cultural identity. As Lee grew older he became more introspective and focused on developing a sense of identity to help him make sense of his globalized existence, and with freely available digital media he began his journey. Television, the Internet, Western pop and consumer culture (the digital) became his world and his teachers through his teenage years and early twenties. Lee emerged from his dive into the digital realm with a clearer identity, yet with many conflicts remaining. With amazement at the amount of information he could consume and the things he could learn about cultures from around the world for free, at the same time he felt disillusioned. Western consumerism, capitalism and politics intrigued, yet frustrated Lee – and that was the driving force that led him to relocate to New York to further ponder and explore this changing relationship of analog vs digital.

WEBSITE :  http://seungjinlee.com/
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/seungjin888/

0:25:34 – DALTON PORTELLA

…an interdisciplinary artist, musician and surfer, living and working in Montauk.

Moving from Miami to Rio, I came of age on Ipanema Beach in the 70’s, an amazing time in the history of Brazilian surf and counter culture. When I was eighteen I moved to California for a couple of years, then landed in NY to study Art at Parsons….. and got a job photo retouching for advertising, back in the days when it was done on film. This eventually morphed into digital work and Photoshop, which I use frequently in my art.

As a kid in Brazil in the ’70s, I’d seen a picture of Montauk in a surf magazine and when I found myself in NY, in 1980, I started coming to Montauk to surf. On 9/11/2001 I moved here full time. While watching the Trade Center burn, I asked myself, what would I regret if this was my last day. The answer was that I would regret not surfing more, waking up to the sound of the ocean, surrounded by nature’s beauty.

After a long, lucrative career in advertising, the last ten or so doing movie poster work for Miramax, practically every poster from Pulp Fiction to Aviator, I forsake the almighty dollar to concentrate on a Fine Art career. Now I make my living selling paintings, fine art prints and playing music. I do some Illustration and Graphic Design and I’ve also created a T-Shirt line called Dalton Apparel.

Over the years I’ve been represented by Roman Fine Art in East Hampton, Sara Nightingale Gallery in Sag Harbor, Solar Gallery in East Hampton and Isabella Garrucho Fine Art in Westport, CT

Website: https://www.daltonportella.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dalton.nft/