Maia Ruth Lee: Bondage Baggage
I’m incredibly honoured to have written the introductory essay for artist Maia Ruth Lee’s first monograph, Bondage Baggage. The book is absolutely stunning, soulful, and alive, thanks to Maia, the contributors, and the artistry of Radius Books.
Working across painting, sculpture, photography, and film, Lee has crafted a visual lexicon that takes on the complexities of the self in times of dissonance and globalisation. Lee was born in Busan, South Korea, grew up in Kathmandu and Seoul, spent over a decade in New York City, and has lived in recent years in Salida, Colorado.
Migration lies at the core of Lee’s experience and comes to form in works that often evoke maps, atlases, and banners with an underlying interest in language, translation, symbols, and signs. In Bondage Baggage, the body is also referenced, as the bound baggage and textile works metaphorically visualise the accumulations and contours of a life. This volume weaves images of the sculpture, paintings, prints, and installation works that comprise this series with an introductory essay by Jade Foster and correspondence between Lee and her community of friends and family around the world, letters that tackle the realities of motherhood, community, language/communication, independence/interdependence, and artmaking in this fraught geopolitical moment.
It’s a deeply profound project that means so much to me, and the acknowledgements (last photo) reflect how relational and expansive her practice is.
The book features numerous moments and includes correspondence from Amanny Ahmad, Brook Hsu, Christine Sun Kim, Jimin Seo, and Martine Syms, as well as installation photographs by Reece Straw of her solo show, Human Life in Motion, at Primary in Nottingham.
Thanks to the generous support of Amanda Minami. The Minami Grant is an initiative which focuses on art and scholarship at the intersection of Asian American and Pacific Islander history and culture.
You can order the book from Radius Books (USA and Worldwide), Waterstones (UK), Mai 36 Galerie (Europe) or from other book stores.