Yona Lee

Yona Lee is an artist who makes sculptures that combine structures of stainless steel tubing with everyday materials of urban and domestic spaces. Her work ranges in scale from tabletop objects to installations that occupy entire buildings and interior architecture.  

Lee’s larger-scale installations invite viewers to enter into and interact with the work in places, and her work allows itself open to being read as structure or system, as serious or funny, as aggressive or playful, as authoritarian or utopian, as utilitarian or pointless, as site-specific or self-contained, as light touch or heavy duty. Having played the cello since childhood, there are parallels between Yona Lee’s approach to the making of sculpture and the sculptural experience of her work with her classical training in music – both in the physical engagement with objects/instrumentation, the specificities and contingencies of audiences and spaces, and relationships between the individual and the collective.

Lee's work has recently been the subject of solo commissions and museum exhibitions at Art Sonje Center, Seoul, South Korea; Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand; Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand; and Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand. Her work has featured in large-scale thematic exhibitions including the Busan Biennale 2020, South Korea; 15th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, France; and 2016 Changwon Sculpture Biennale. 

Yona Lee is represented by Fine Arts, Sydney.