• Maia Ruth Lee Once we leave a place is it there
    Installation view of Maia Ruth Lee, Human Life in Motion, Primary, Nottingham, 2025.

    Maia Ruth Lee

    Once we leave a place is it there

  • For Art Basel Unlimited, Maia Ruth Lee presents Once we leave a place is it there (2024–2025), a large-scale installation that marks a significant extension of her Bondage Baggage series. The installation is composed of six monumental banners. Arranged like a spiritual procession, the work evokes the formal stillness of the Buddhist temples Lee frequented during her upbringing in Nepal. Visitors are invited to walk between the banners, each measuring over thirty- seven feet long. Five banners painted in black, white, yellow, blue, and red correspond to obangsaek, the five elemental directions in Korean cosmology. The sixth green banner symbolizes free passage and safety, expanding the symbolic language of the series.

  • Lee’s Bondage Baggage paintings expand on her ongoing sculptural series inspired by the bound luggage commonly seen at the international... Lee’s Bondage Baggage paintings expand on her ongoing sculptural series inspired by the bound luggage commonly seen at the international... Lee’s Bondage Baggage paintings expand on her ongoing sculptural series inspired by the bound luggage commonly seen at the international...

    Lee’s Bondage Baggage paintings expand on her ongoing sculptural series inspired by the bound luggage commonly seen at the international airport in Kathmandu, where the artist was raised. These parcels, bundled by migrant workers and travelers crossing borders, appear to Lee as vessels carrying stories shaped by movement, limitation, and endurance. Each painting begins as a three-dimensional object wrapped in linen, clothing, and used textiles, then tightly fastened with rope. After dyeing the whole form with India ink and pigments, Lee removes the cords and unfolds the canvas, revealing abstract, map-like impressions that bear the imprint of their previous bound state. Through this process, the works speak to the physical, psychological, and emotional textures of diasporic life, and to the possibilities for healing and transformation that arise through displacement rather than stability.

  • Together, the six banners create a contemplative passageway that echoes the shifting states of belonging, transition, and rootedness that shape Lee’s life and practice. Lee was born in Busan, South Korea, raised in Kathmandu, Nepal, and is currently based in San Francisco. Her multidisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, photography, and video, and is driven by questions of selfhood formed within movement, translation, and diasporic experience. Translation functions as a conceptual tool through which Lee shifts between media, engaging themes of borders, community, language, carriers, loss, and self-preservation. Her use of India ink, with its reference to calligraphy and mark-making, underscores a human impulse toward storytelling and archiving. Rather than centering loss or dislocation, Lee’s work opens pathways toward new lexicons that give form to transient lives and their accumulated stories.

  • Once we leave a place is it there (2024–2025) was previously featured in Lee’s solo exhibitions at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University (2024) and Primary Nottingham, UK (2025). Lee has held solo exhibitions at Primary (Nottingham, UK), the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Francois Ghebaly (Los Angeles), and Jack Hanley Gallery (New York). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions including the Sky High Farm Biennial 2025, Prospect 6 in New Orleans, the Aspen Art Museum, the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Helena Anrather, CANADA Gallery, Studio Museum 127, Salon 94, Overduin & Co., and Roberts & Tilton. She studied at Hongik University in Seoul and Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, and is the recipient of the Gold Art Prize (2021) and the Rema Hort Mann Grant (2017). Her work is held in the public collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

  • About the Artist

    About the Artist

    Born in Busan, South Korea, then growing up between Kathmandu and Seoul, Maia Ruth Lee (b. 1983) spent over a decade in New York City, recently relocating to San Francisco, California. Her lived experience of migrating as well as an awareness and empathy for the life of migrants in Kathmandu serve as continual source of inspiration and investigation for Lee. Therefore, her multidisciplinary practice spanning photography, video, painting, and sculpture move through questions around the self as a diasporic subject that expands and challenges our notion of borders and communities. Her baggage and textile works are metaphors and stand in’s of the body, their accumulations and narratives. Language as a mechanism in its ability and failure to shape and give account to experiences, memories, and emotions has been a major thread in Lee’s work, as for those whose lives are precarious and unrooted—maps, atlases, and banners become a device that calls to mind their life of movement, and often, loss. Lee’s use of india ink, with its reference to calligraphy, point to human compulsion for storytelling, mark making, and archiving. Rather than lingering in futility and loss, Lee’s work opens up a passageway, forging new lexicons that give form to lives of transience, their stories, beyond immediate and accepted forms of legibility and comprehension.