Embroidery

A tactile complement to his drawings, Lee widely employs embroidery to denote mourning and reverence through the materials he utilizes and the intertextual visual language he adopts. Lee recreates subtle details, such as found images or quotes from historical and contemporary queer writers, using antique 24-karat gold thread sourced from finite and dwindling stocks in Kyoto, Japan. His delicate embroideries are sewn into hand-spun sambe cloth, a traditional Korean hemp fiber associated with funerary rites and rituals. The textual excerpts Lee selects are frequently transposed into the signature script of Chinese-American painter Martin Wong. This calligraphic reference—which appropriates American Sign Language and transforms it into a semi-figurative font—emphasizes how Lee’s embroideries, also crafted by hand, act as an embodiment of physical materials with which he engages. The works range in size and mode of display: some are presented as individually-framed swatches or incorporated into larger assemblages while others form large-scale hangings that take the form of garments, tapestries, and movable structures.