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.