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 since 2023 as a lens to recover devalued histories and goddess-centered mythologies. The human civilization’s foundations lie not in conquest or competition, but in the fundamental exchanges between mother and child—spaces where knowledge transmits through care, love, and embodied connection. My matrilineal/matrifocal societies research proves that these mother-centered societies maintained profound relationships with the natural world, offering crucial models for resisting the patriarchal domination and objectification of women, land, and Indigenous peoples. Based on what I am learning through this theoretical research, I am developing a body of work that focuses on reviving the symbols and imagining social structures rooted in care, reciprocity, and embodied connection—offering pathways toward new modes of feeling, and connecting with other living beings.
Young Joo Lee is an artist from South Korea, currently living and working in Paris. Lee’s work has been shown internationally at festivals, institutions and galleries: Seoul Museum of Art, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, Alternative Space LOOP (Seoul, KR), The Drawing Center (NYC), SIGGRAPH, Cairo Video Festival (Cairo, Egypt), GLAS animation festival (LA, US), Immigrant Artist Biennial (NYC), Curitiba Biennial (Curitiba, BR), etc. Lee was a resident artist at places such as Cité internationale des arts Paris, Macdowell, The Music Center LA, Sanskriti Foundation, and Incheon Art Platform.
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), Visiting lecturer at Harvard University (2020-Spring 2023), a College Fellow in Media Practice at Harvard University (2018-20), 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).
Full CV [PDF]
Represented by OCHI Gallery
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