Maia Ruth Lee: Bondage Baggage

After growing up and living in South Korea, Kathmandu, New York City, and Colorado, migration lies at the core of Maia Ruth Lee's practice, coming to form in works that evoke maps, atlases, and banners with an underlying interest in language, translation, symbols, and signs that permeates through her first monograph.

Working across painting, sculpture, photography, and film, Lee has crafted a visual lexicon that takes on the complexities of the self in times of dissonance and globalization. In Bondage Baggage, the body is also referenced, as the bound baggage and textile works metaphorically visualize the accumulations and contours of a life.

The book weaves images of the sculpture, paintings, prints, and installation works that comprise this series with correspondence between Lee and artist peers from around the world, letters that tackle the realities of motherhood, community, language/communication, independence and interdependence, and art-making in this fraught geopolitical moment. Contributors include Amanny Ahmad, Brook Hsu, Christine Sun Kim, Jimin Seo, and Martine Syms, with an introduction by Jade Foster.

Lee's work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Maia Ruth Lee (b. 1983 in Busan, South Korea) lives and works in Salida, Colorado. Recent solo exhibitions include François Ghebaly, Los Angeles (2024, 2022); Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (2024); Tina Kim Gallery, New York (2023); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2021). Lee participated in numerous group exhibitions at venues including Prospect.6, New Orleans (2024); Center for Visual Arts, Denver (2023); Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2022); Whitney Biennial, New York (2019); and Studio Museum 127, New York (2019). She is represented by Tina Kim Gallery in New York and François Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles.

Jade Foster is a British curator, artist and art historian of Afro-Caribbean heritage based in Nottingham. Foster holds positions as a Trustee / Board Member of Nottingham Contemporary and Public Programme Curator at Primary in Nottingham. Current curatorial interests include modern and contemporary painting, performance, and time-based media exploring errantry, queerness, corporality, and social practice.

Amanny Ahmad is a Palestinian-American artist, cook, land worker, and folk herbalist. In her research-based practice, she studies whole systems design, food as language, land as life, historical & contemporary relationships between humans & non-humans, botany, mycology, indigenous culinary traditions & plant use; and how those things can teach us about preservation, survival, and world-making.

Brook Hsu (b. 1987) deploys and weaves the autobiographical and the mythopoetic into paintings using an array of materials, including ink, oil paint, industrial carpets, and off-cuts of ready-made lumber. Her works aim to question how we define representation today, producing abstract and figurative works that employ a host of signs and motifs, recounting stories of love, pain and humor. Hsu says of her practice, 'I seek to understand what we value in life by asking how we value the world.'

Jimin Seo was born in Seoul, Korea and immigrated to the US to join his family at the age of eight. He earned his MFA from Columbia University and BA from Florida State University. He is the author of OSSIA, a winner of The Changes Book Prize judged by Louise Glück.  His poems can be found in Action Fokus, The Canary, LitHub, Pleiades, mercury firs, and The Bronx Museum.

Christine Sun Kim (b. 1980) is an American sound artist, performer and activist based in Berlin. Working predominantly in drawing, performance, and video, Kim's art practice considers how sound operates in society. Musical notation, written language, American Sign Language (ASL), and the use of the body are all recurring elements in her work. Her work has been exhibited in major cultural institutions internationally, including in the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Martine Syms (born 1988) is an American artist residing in Los Angeles, specializing in various mediums including publishing, video, installation, and performance. Her artistic endeavors revolve around themes of identity, particularly the representation of the self, with a focus on subjects like feminism and black culture. Syms frequently employs humor and social commentary as vehicles for exploration within her work.