I was born in South Korea and spent my youth in the suburbs of Seoul, in a town called Sanbon—a name that means the root or foundation of a mountain. What was once farmland, abundant natural springs, and habitats of local insects, animals, and plants rapidly transformed into a vast complex of high-rise apartments. The spring dried up; a tunnel now cuts through the mountain. Having played freely in that landscape, communicated with animals and plants in my full childhood imagination, and witnessed its dramatic transformation over the past thirty years, I carry a deep longing for what was lost. This tension between memory and disappearance, nature and modern man fundamentally shapes my artistic practice.
My immigrant experiences, beginning in Germany as an adolescent Asian girl, further inform how I perceive racial, sexual, cultural, and political dynamics that continue to shape our world. Since then, living in Germany, the United States, Canada, and France has expanded this lens, embedding a multiplicity of perspectives into my work.
As diverse as my experiences have been, so are my methods. I work across painting, drawing, performance, sculpture, and digital media to create intentionally heterogeneous works that shift with time, place, and material. Rather than committing to a fixed style or branded identity, I follow intuition and embrace fluidity in form and expression.
Recent projects use my experience of motherhood as a lens to recover forgotten histories and goddess-centered mythologies. Through painting and writing, I revive these symbols and imagine social structures rooted in care, reciprocity, and embodied connection—offering pathways toward new modes of feeling, and perhaps feeling with “the other.”
Young Joo Lee is an artist from South Korea, currently living and working in Paris. Lee currently is a doctoral candidate at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Lee was an Assistant professor at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University (-Spring 2024), a College Fellow in Media Practice at Harvard University (2018-20), Macdowell fellow (2021), a recipient of Fulbright Scholarship in Film & Digital Media (2015-18), and DAAD artist scholarship (2010-12). Lee holds an MFA in Sculpture at Yale University (2017) and an MFA in Film at the Academy of Fine Arts Städelschule Frankfurt (2013).
CV [PDF]
Represented by OCHI Gallery
For any inquiries, please contact the gallery at GALLERY@OCHIGALLERY.COM