Shortly after, I went to see the exhibition Maia Ruth Lee: The skin of the earth is seamless at the Tina Kim Gallery (April 6-May 6, 2023), poet and translator Soje sent me this poem by Korean poet Kim Eon Hee, which they had translated as:
Trunk This leather trunk So tough, so bloated, so heavy Unzip it and it Gapes open, its entire body a maw Comes returned to sender After being refused Stuffed with a chopped-up memory wrapped in plastic, it Stinks, so Freakish
Reading the translation brought me back to Lee’s exhibition, which consists of paintings, sculptures and a video, “The Letter” (2023). What connects these works is Lee’s experience of migration, living in the diaspora, being uprooted and traveling between the three cultures in which she has lived for long periods: South Korea, where she was born and attended art school, a small Sherpa village in the Himalayas, where she spent her childhood and teenage years, and different parts of the United States, including New York and Salida, Colorado, where she lives and is working now.
“The Letter” is made up of excerpts from family films documenting, among other things, the artist’s parents and brother, his move from Seoul to a remote region of the Himalayas and life in the mountains. After the plane lands, the travelers unload their luggage and start walking up a trail; it took Lee’s family two weeks to reach the village where she and her brother grew up. Many people carry packed bags that echo the carvings lying on the ground nearby. Lee’s parents went to Nepal to compile a Korean-Sherpa dictionary. Since Sherpa is an oral Tibetan language, the task took many years. As the film plays, we read excerpts from letters the artist wrote to his friends in 2020 and 2022, during the pandemic, mostly about the ideas of “home” and “place.”
Made in 2023, the sculptures are part of the series Bondage Baggage (2018-ongoing), in which Lee wraps parcels, boxes, and suitcases in plastic sheets, tarps, burlap, or canvas, which is then carefully tied with a rope-like cord which she uses to enclose the object in a tight net. The title of the series can be interpreted in multiple ways, inviting viewers to go beyond the literal. Looking at the tightly wrapped forms, I unexpectedly remembered a staged photograph of Unica Zürn bound by rope, by Hans Bellmer, which appeared on the cover of Surrealism, Meme. Headless and limbless, his body is seen from behind, the vertebrae barely visible. Lee’s linked sculptural forms are surrogate torsos.
Stacked against the wall, the objects in “BB Check-in” (2023) may draw inspiration from the artist’s memory of airports and conveyor belts, but their removal from context changes them; they become limbless corpses, lost objects, flexible vessels containing the stuff of his life, reminders of upheavals, migrations, deportations, imprisonments and even tortures. Heaps of baggage stir up all sorts of associations, reminding us that forced migration is a legacy of the modern era.
Although not immediately apparent, the carvings are central to Lee’s painting process: she wraps bundles in unprimed canvas, ties them with strings, and rubs ink across her uneven surface. Then she cuts the cords and unfolds and stretches the canvas; she doesn’t know what the painting will look like until it is stretched. Unsurprisingly, it reminded me of the folding paintings that French-Hungarian artist Simon Hantaï began making in 1960. His technique involved folding the canvas into different configurations and applying paint to the exposed areas. Writing about Hantai in 2006, Carter Ratcliff was precise in his estimate:
[Hantaï] is one of the few artists, European or American, to have responded to the poured paintings of Jackson Pollock in a truly original way. Pollock invented a new way of painting and Hantaï did the same.
If a careful examination reveals that the resemblance is superficial, and I think that Lee arrived at his approach without being directly inspired by Hantaï, it is important to state this, because the two artists share an interest in destabilizing the figure-ground relationship, although for different reasons.
By wrapping sculptural objects in her Bondage Baggage series in unprimed canvas, then fixing them with a cord, Lee begins with an unsightly and unforgiving three-dimensional surface. Unlike Pollock’s canonical readings and minimalist response to his work, Lee is not interested in being literal. She wants viewers to make associations and recognize the unstable world she and many others live in, her memories of both personal and collective experience. The one thing she knows when she starts a painting is that there will always be unpainted areas in her work.
Lee’s use of ink to smudge raw canvas is rooted in the tradition of Asian ink painting on paper. Formally, she pushed the ink painting into a new place, while staying true to her diasporic experience. The tension between the painted and gridded areas and the raw canvas makes these paintings strong. It is as if the white areas were irregular notches cutting through the grids. The figure/ground tension is heightened in “BBL Cobalt Umbra 1–46” (2023). Two sharp-edged shapes in the paint that appear to be exploding are connected by a blue sharp-edged shape that extends between them. The two gridded blue shapes appear to be pushing outward. Dotted lines are visible in the linear spaces between the grid rectangles. With their unevenly inked blue rectangles arranged in a loose grid set in ragged form, Lee’s flat forms register both crumbling order and violent change.
In “BBM Cobalt Umbra 1–45” (2023), almost square, the sharp triangles formed by the unpainted floor underline an insoluble struggle. This formal impasse is an image worthy of our time.
Maia Ruth Lee: The skin of the earth is seamless continues at the Tina Kim Gallery (525 West 21st Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through May 6. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
