In 2013 the artist Maia Ruth Lee, whose multidisciplinary work uses a wide array of materials to explore the tangled topic of migration, paid a visit to her parents in Nepal, where she had lived from kindergarten until the end of high school. Passing through the Kathmandu airport, she was newly captivated by a familiar sight: luggage wrapped in colorful tarps and fastened with rope and tape, often belonging to workers returning home from jobs abroad.
"It was one of those things where you've seen it growing up, but you've never noticed," says Lee. "And you notice for the first time because you are looking at everything differently."
Her relocation to New York City a few years prior had broadened her perspective on the world, and her own shifting place within it. She had moved many times before as a kid: She was born in 1983 in Busan, South Korea, but her parents' work as Bible translators brought Lee and her brother to Singapore and Papua New Guinea before they settled in Nepal for the massive undertaking of translating the New Testament into Sherpa, which first called for the creation of a new alphabet. After Lee graduated from high school in Kathmandu, she returned to South Korea to study painting at Hongik University in Seoul. But it was her leap in her late 20s to New York City, a richly multicultural place but also a seat of Western power, that was the biggest shakeup of them all.
"For the first time I could fully zoom out and see the big picture," she says. That's what clicked for her at the Kathmandu airport on the 2013 trip. She saw what these beautifully rumpled pieces of luggage represented: displacement, labor, self-preservation, borders. She started photographing them, and her Bondage Baggage series, which continues to this day, was born.
In the 13 years since, Lee, who now lives in San Francisco with her husband and their eight-year-old son, has expanded Bondage Baggage through thoughtful iteration. In 2018 she began making sculptures out of tarps, old bedding, and ropes to mimic the luggage she'd seen throughout her childhood. In 2020, after an unexpected move from New York to Colorado spurred by the pandemic, she started evolving her sculptures into paintings by coating their surfaces in ink and then cutting the ropes to reveal poignant, tie-dye-like prints. And this year she has found even more ways to explore life in transit, with soft towers of expandable duffel bags and latex molds made from previous Bondage Baggage sculptures.
Her many years of experimentation come to a head in "Double Vision," Lee's new solo exhibition at Tina Kim Gallery in Chelsea, opening September 10. The show's title, which comes from Homi K. Bhabha's 1994 book of postcolonial theory, The Location of Culture, is a nod to perception's mutability-and to the artistic ouroboros inherent to Lee's work. People often ask her how she makes the paintings, whether they come before or after the sculptures, and which parts are painted and which left untouched. She smiles. "I like the confusion that it creates. What started first doesn't really matter to me because it's being recycled," she says. "There's a cyclical thing always happening in my work."
The latex-mold objects in the show are the clearest example of this. They are like collages of her practice over time for how they reanimate previous artworks and splice them together. This is the first time Lee has worked with the material, which she loves for its craggy but supple, skin-like feel and its eventual deterioration-qualities that artistic forebears like Eva Hesse and Lynda Benglis have prized as well.
Along with paintings and the latex works that have grown out of the Bondage Baggage lineage, Lee includes a film of candid family footage shot in Nepal and Korea from 1990 to 1998, and 15 glyphs, her ongoing series of welded symbols made from scrap metal. Her glyphs, which often correspond with a lexicon of her own making, will be on prominent display next spring at the Queens Museum, which has just selected Lee for its prestigious Large Wall Commission.
"Collectively, the works in this presentation push her investigations into the migrant experience powerfully forward, united across diverse media through their resonant grappling with the vessel as a metaphor for movement, memory, and motherhood," says gallerist Tina Kim, who was immediately taken with Lee's work when she first saw it in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Lee's unique process, Kim says, "embeds a sense of care and tenderness into each work."
Migration for Lee is not just an artistic interest and personal experience but also, as of this past year, an academic pursuit. Lee, her husband, and their son moved to California for Lee to seek a master's degree in migration studies at the University of San Francisco. She found the program almost accidentally. She had been working on an artist's statement one day while still living in Colorado. "I was going into a little bit of a stir-crazy, What am I doing with my career kind of thing," she recalls. She googled "migration" to see what noodling around the internet might produce, and one of the results was for the USF program. Lee had never been to San Francisco and hadn't known that migration studies, a field only about a decade old, even existed. "Weirdly algorithms have been a thing in my life," she says.
While she found a few other migration studies programs, she liked that USF approached it through a social justice lens. In the beginning, she thought there would be a little more separation between her studies and her art. "But of course it's showing up in various ways," Lee says. She's understanding her work differently, bringing in theory, realizing she wasn't alone in thinking about the many causes and effects of diasporic life. It's an endlessly complex topic-and with ICE raids in the US and growing animosity toward immigrants across the globe, ever more urgent. "Migration touches everything," she says.
If "Double Vision" had a tagline, it might be "I Am Expandable," a phrase that appears on yellow keychains attached to Luggage Installation, her towers of stacked bags (which Lee tells me are literally called migrant bags in Korea). The keychains are real-they come with these types of bags-but in Lee's hands, they are also metaphors. The bags' sides are printed with stills from her family's home movies. But if certain zippers are pulled, the bags collapse, and those snippets of Nepali life go out of sight. "Some parts can be discreet, some parts can be exposed," Lee says, "which I think really goes hand-in-hand with what migration is: You show what you want to show."
But expansiveness is also about generosity, and Lee's capacity for care and collaboration is a driving force in her practice. "Maia is an incredible connector and deeply embedded in her community," says Kim. She has taught art in after-school programs. She's on the board of Artists & Mothers, a nonprofit that offers grants to support artist mothers with childcare. Her collaboration with Korean arts nonprofit GYOPO and Comme Si earlier this year saw her leading an embroidery workshop in Los Angeles.
Lee is not particularly religious, but she is a spiritual person and a deep thinker. At a pre-opening walkthrough I ask her if she considers herself a translator of some sort, a visual equivalent of what her parents did with language. "I never thought of myself as a translator," she replies, "but if I think about myself with my art practice, that is what I'm doing." Her work takes an idea and continually reinterprets it. "It becomes flat, it becomes sturdy, it becomes latex, it becomes a painting, it becomes an installation-but they're all kind of in the same world."
Lee was installing "Double Vision" as news broke of the devastating floods in Nepal. She considered calling off the show. But for work that is about the amorphous concept of home-of losing it, of making it anew, of how it frames your world-there was a potency in grappling with the tragedy and moving ahead.
"My work has always been rooted in, of course, my biography and the history of my family," she says, "but it's really been rooted in Nepal." Not just the physical location of it, but how she experienced it, how it influenced her ways of knowing and seeing. That is what she is translating in her work: the in-betweenness of coming and going, the liminal spaces that make up a life.
—Grace Edquist
