Kang Seung Lee

Lee’s process begins with research and results in delicately-composed drawings, embroidered works, installations, videos, and performances—all of which he views as “tangible and direct means of ‘caring for’ the past.” His artworks incorporate archival and natural materials, which bear witness to collective traumas, most notably the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Lee memorializes artistic figures who died from AIDS-related complications, recontextualizing the creative contributions and biographies of individuals such as Goh Choo San, José Leonilson, and Martin Wong. Processing grief across generations and cultures, Lee expresses resistance to cultural amnesia through naturalistic drawings of photographs and artworks that erase their human subjects, smudging out their presence to speak to the poignancy of loss.

Lee’s installations are primarily composed of organic materials like parchment, antique gold-coated Japanese silk thread, and sambe—a traditional Korean woven hemp textile associated with funerals—as well as flora, soil, and other terrestrial objects gathered from sites significant to his subjects. He describes, “[through] the process of collecting materials or making them into art my physical or artistic labor is made visible … I put a lot of effort into carefully and rigorously choosing each material through associations of meaning, but I also allow myself to play more freely and intuitively … It creates this space for bodily experience through artistic labor that cannot easily be put into words.”

Within individual works and series, Lee often combines references to multiple individuals, forging intergenerational and transcultural connections. He gathers discrete iconographies and materials in multimedia assemblages and multipart installations, such as those presented at the 60^th Venice Biennale in 2024. Stitching together histories, Lee pays homage to psychic connections and shared experiences between pivotal figures of queer culture including Tseng Kwong Chi and Joon-soo Oh. Challenging viewers to imagine new possibilities for connection and empathy, Lee upholds, “My mining of queer archives definitely started from the desire to be connected and to be part of a lineage ... I feel like this way of working across time, distance, space, caregiving, touring, artmaking, teaching, research, etc. is a form of continued public and privately negotiated dialogue, writing, and rewriting.”

Lee’s work has been the subject of numerous solo presentations, including Sala de Vídeo: Kang Seung Lee, MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo), Brazil (2024); Who will care for our caretakers, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (2023); The Heart of A Hand, Vincent Price Art Museum, East Los Angeles College, Monterey Park, CA (2023); Briefly Gorgeous, Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, South Korea (2021); Permanent Visitor, Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Becoming Atmosphere, 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA (2020); and untitled (la revolución es la solución!), Artpace, San Antonio, TX (2017), among others. Lee has participated in many group exhibitions, including Foreigners Everywhere, 60th Venice Biennale, Italy (2024); Out of the Night of Norms (Out of the Enormous Ennui), Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2023); We Cry Poetry, de Appel, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2023); documenta fifteen, Kassel, Germany (2022); Soft Water, Hard Stone, New Museum Triennial, New York, NY (2021); and Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning, 13th Gwangju Biennial, Korea (2021), among others. Lee's work is in the collections of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, CA; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo), Brazil; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and Sunpride Foundation, Hong Kong, among others. He is the recipient of many grants and awards including the Artadia Award (2023); MacDowell Fellowship (2022); apexart New York International Open Call (2019); and Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant (2018), among others. In 2023, he was a finalist for the Korea Artist Prize. Kang Seung Lee is also represented by Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles and Mexico City, and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul.