Maia Ruth Lee

Born in Busan, South Korea, raised between Kathmandu and Seoul, and now based in San Francisco, Maia Ruth Lee works across painting, sculpture, photography, and video to explore migration as a condition of memory, perception, and identity. Her practice considers how histories and experiences of migration are carried through bodies, objects, language, and material. Lee’s work is informed by translation as both a means of communication and a process of transformation. Her practice comprises an ever-expanding archive in a constant state of assembly, stacking, transporting, translating, and seeing. 

Lee’s practice reconsiders objects of travel and labor as vessels for personal and collective histories. Her Bondage Baggage series of interrelated paintings and sculptures draw from migrant luggage; the suitcase serves as a generative metaphor where memory, expectation, and aspiration collide. Beginning their lives as compressed, bundled canvases, the works are transformed into map-like records of movement and accumulated experience. Lee gives shape to the layered histories and shifting sense of belonging that define lives lived across borders.

Maia Ruth Lee (b. 1983, Busan; lives and works in San Francisco) has held solo exhibitions at Primary Nottingham (UK), Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (NY), The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (CO), François Ghebaly Gallery (LA), and Mai 36 Galerie (CH). Lee has participated in numerous group exhibitions at institutions including Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Aspen Art Museum, as well as the Sky High Farm Biennial 2025 (NY); Prospect 6., New Orleans; and the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Lee received a BFA from Hongik University and attended the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada, and is currently enrolled in a Masters in Migration Studies program at the University of San Francisco. Lee was the recipient of the Gold Art Prize in 2021 and the Rema Hort Mann grant in 2017. Her work is held in the permanent collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Syracuse University Art Museum.