Tightly secured bales of clothes can assume different meanings in art installations: for Busan-born, Colorado-based artist Maia Ruth Lee, for example, they represent themes linked with migration.
In 2018 Lee started a series entitled "Bondage Baggage", featuring fabric sculptures inspired by the luggage secured with tape and rope (a method used by many migrant workers returning to Nepal to prevent theft at the airport) seen on conveyor belts at the international airport in Kathmandu, where the artist grew up.
The artist perceived the colourful parcels covered with bedsheets and tarps and secured with ropes as thoughtfully packaged vessels containing personal narratives and as symbols of migratory experiences, displacement, and privacy protection. Lee then tried to recreate them binding together linen, clothing, and used materials, and covering them with plastic, tarps, burlap, or canvas. Fastened with tape or cords, the bundles bulge and strain, the ropes securing them hinting at containment and constrictions, but also at resilience, perseverance and self-preservation.
Lee has a connection with textiles that goes beyond these parcels: in the past she did an exhibition that featured sewing patterns, used in that case as instrumental tools to create a garment to protect the body.
Lee's latest exhibition at Tina Kim Gallery in New York (until 6th May) represents an extension of the "Bondage Baggage" theme. The title is inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1987 text "Borderlands/La Frontera" in which the writer compares the diasporic identity to an open wound, writing "the skin of the earth is seamless, the sea cannot be fenced, el mar does not stop at borders."
The expanded "Bondage Baggage" pieces reflect the artist's longstanding concerns about the emotional and physical realities of migration, diaspora, and borders. The exhibited works explore the themes of constant mobility, but also of healing and transformation, and the interplay between the competing forces of flux and stability.
Lee's neatly packaged bundles of humble possessions become in this exhibition the starting point for her paintings. The latter aren't indeed conventional paintings, but parts of her "Bondage Baggage" sculptures, that the artist developed after she relocated to Colorado from New York.
To create the artworks, the artist coats the sculpture's outer canvas layer with ink that permeates through and around the ropes. When the ropes are cut, the "skin" of the sculpture unfurls, revealing Lee's "Bondage Baggage" paintings. The paintings, with their leather-like or aged skin appearance, look visually intriguing and they emit a radiant energy from their internal center outward. From three-dimensional, the parcels become flat, producing a printed grid, almost a symbol of fences, gates and boundaries, evoking the lines of longitudes and latitudes on maps and atlases and therefore expanding the migration narrative.
While the parcel pieces represent the physical and tactile dimension, the paintings are abstractions. It is as if Lee translated one into another, to pay homage to her parents who are translators and to investigate identities in relation to languages.
The exhibition also features another sculptural series: empty mesh pods crafted from discarded ropes removed from the original "Bondage Baggage" sculptures, that now resemble empty shells. They can be interpreted as the exoskeletal remnants of the works' metamorphosis. Fragile in nature, the pods only preserve faint traces of the objects they once safeguarded.
Lee included in "The Skin of the Earth is Seamless" a video as well in which she sampled and edited together old family footage shot by her father in her rural hometown of Nepal, superimposing text excerpts from the letters she wrote to her friends while moving to Colorado during the pandemic. The video tackles a variety of themes - home, family, spiritual inheritance, language, and again translation.
Lee's exploration of migration as a generative force for artistic creation is a profound and powerful pursuit, reflecting her incisive examination of complex themes. Her innovative approach is empowering and provides a unique perspective on the human experience.
Moreover, you can bet that the fashion world will take notice of Lee's vivid "Bondage Baggage" paintings, and perhaps even consider her for a collaboration for runway installations or collections (maybe with Jonathan Anderson at Loewe as the designer already created a quilted wool maxi coat with hand applied netted white stitching that echoes Maia Ruth Lee's works? View this photo).
Image credits for this post
Installation views of "Maia Ruth Lee: The skin of the earth is seamless" at Tina Kim Gallery, New York (April 6 - May 6, 2023). Courtesy of Tina Kim Gallery. Photo by Charles Roussel.
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