Yein Lee

In my practice, I’ve been focusing on bodily matter as a field that embodies emotional states and social issues. My works often present elements like latex skins, plastic flesh, motorbike parts, organs, or metal bones with a painterly touch on them. Here the concept of the body doesn’t remain just in the human realm. I include body parts both from human or nonhuman beings like plants, birds or machines. This combination often shows organs without a body, an in-between state of life and death, and an emotional gesture is embedded in it. Currently, I cannot relate to a multi-disciplines approach as I’m primarily working on painterly sculptures or sculptural paintings. Still, I’m willing to try one day by including sound, set-up, and performance.

Hybridity is about history, present and future. Different species have been combined genetically during our history, and they kept creating new species—cell to cell, plants to plants, animals to animals, human to human. Of course, sometimes, this occurs through cross-pollination processes. Genetic engineering between human and nonhuman spheres has been of great interest within the contemporary biotechnology field. And through the artistic practice, a body becomes an indication, an implication of what we face in society and culture. For me, it becomes a portal to invite viewers to the world that I imagined.

I have been calling You, styrofoam, epoxy putty, fake flower, spike, spray paint, 2020, Installation View of Crosspollination at Loggia, Vienna

I discovered Yein Lee in 2020 and was seduced by her works because they always have some element of biotechnology, there's always the suggestion of macabre elements of rot and decay that are decorated beautifully with something organic (usually flower or natural colours). At times, Lee's sculptures or installations seem skeletal, they contain this variance in texture between spiked wet paint, metal, transparent plastic wrap, and concrete, which depicts a fragility I want to evoke in my knit project. As I also want to utilize liquid latex, I think Yein Lee's work supports this addition of almost a layer of skin (out of latex) on top of loose-knit that suggests something ambivalent: the discord between strength and fragility.

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