ABOUT
JeeYeun Lee is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago. Through performance, objects, and socially engaged art, her work explores dynamics of connection, power, violence and resistance. Her work has been shown in Chicago, Detroit, Santa Fe, Ohio, Missouri, and France. She has worked with social justice and community-based organizations for over thirty years in immigrant rights, economic justice, LGBTQ issues, and domestic violence. She holds an M.F.A. in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art, M.A. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley, and B.A. in Linguistics from Stanford University.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My creative practice combines my background as a textile artist, my work as an activist, and my personal experiences of migration across the US, Europe, and Asia. Most recently, I have been using walking as a medium to be in relationship to place. My artwork confronts the ways that genocide, colonization and racism shape our lived experience of place in the U.S., using walking to feel how these histories manifest in the built environment as landscapes of displacement, confinement and exclusion. I have conducted durational walking performances in Detroit, Santa Fe, and Chicago, and created socially engaged projects for others to walk and witness. Each project is formed through a cyclical process of research, making and reflecting, shared through installations, publications, videos, and performative lectures.
I use this work to deconstruct my position as an immigrant from a formerly colonized country, living in the U.S. as a result of imperialism, used in the project of settler colonialism to occupy indigenous land and as a middle agent in racial capitalism. My goal is to investigate how this position and my work can move towards decolonization and liberation for all living things.