Yein Lee

From personal experiences Lee started questioning who is entitled to be "I", or "You". And her attention expanded to the concept of the body, and towards more bodies. Then: the body as an autonomous agency, her sculptures reflect the complexity of bodily matter; a chain of theoretical, social, and political effects. Yein Lee's sculptures exhibited at the Danube Festival convey the notion of the body as an open system and illustrate the transgressive power of performative and relational bodies. Lee's works embrace radical fragmentation as part of an ever-expanding open system. Her sculptures, which oscillate between growth and decay, handmade and readymade, and artificial and natural materials, encapsulate the human body as a signifier that carries autonomous agency. Investigating social dissonance in her extended surroundings, adhesive materials connect found objects and structures, and painterly gestures on the sculpture's skins contribute to repurposing context and reforming miscellaneous elements.

Unfleshed, cubistically deformed skull fragments, as if shot to pieces, limbs that resemble makeshift patched-up conduits: Yein Lee’s sculptures look like deranged, sexless cyborg skeletons from science fiction dystopias, yet their postures have something familiar and fragile about them. In her art, Lee no longer distinguishes between nature and technology, bodies and machines. The self is an alien: “For me, my blood vessels are cables.”