Drawings

Drawing is a tool of appropriation and preservation for Lee, used to depict pre-existing and historically significant visual materials including artworks, photographs, documents, and natural objects. Curator David Evan Frantz describes Lee’s proclivity for meticulous naturalistic representation as “an act of cross-temporal embodiment,” where an intangible past is edited and rematerialized through the artist’s self-evident labor. For Lee, this reverential process translates across numerous modes of historical reproduction, such as his reworking of the self-portrait photographs of the late Tseng Kwong Chi or his carefully-rendered portrayals of the pages of AIDS activist Avram Finkelstein’s journal.

Lee challenges how subjects marked by alterity and political oppression are represented in moments of social upheaval, as with his co-opting of the images of photojournalists taken during the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. Prior to rendering images in graphite, he commonly uses digital technology to erase the appearance of human figures, often leaving a conspicuous smudge in their place. “When blurring/removing human figures in my drawing,” Lee explains, “I am surely thinking about a visual metaphor about all the lives and memories lost and injured during riots and other social unrest, but at the same time, I am also interested in taking out these bodies … that continue to create racialized figures and perpetuate the stereotypes.” Through this process, Lee poetically explores the experience of being a witness to the socio-political erasure of entire communities by drawing the attention of viewers away from the redacted figure and toward the figure’s environs. Once produced, Lee’s drawings adopt various methods of display as standalone artworks, enlarged prints, posters, murals, tapestries, and installations.