Sangmin Lee

Sangmin Lee reimagine personal/historical narratives that speculate on the uncertain spaces between past and present. From drywall peaches, performances unfolding architecture, to life-sized Simpsons (cartoon)sculptures, Lee converge seemingly unrelated things to describe stories of fragmentation. Using various materials found in daily life, they create a process of objects that iteratively extend from the slippery ends of their own meaning—becoming a lineage that gradually lose resemblance to one another. A game of broken telephone where new stories emerge.

Here, they make memories into objects and play within the poetic spaces of its impossibility by visually tracing how we extend memories to fill absence, as the lies we tell ourselves and truths beyond recollection.

Their current research focuses on nostalgia without memory, informal digital archives, urban ecologies, and using common materials in unconventional ways.

Sangmin Lee is a Korean Canadian artist with a BFA from OCADUniversity and an MFA from Columbia University. They have exhibited nationally and internationally ranging from Osaka, Jeongseon, Paris, New York, Miami,Montreal, Toronto, and Dawson City (Yukon). He is the recipient of the OCADUniversity Project 31 Sculpture/Installation award, with artist grants fromToronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, and Canada Council for the Arts, and residencies at Vermont Studio Center and NAVE Residency in Ecuador. Currently, they are based in New York and a Bronx Museum AIM Fellow.