Sungjae Lee and Stella Lee are interdisciplinary artists, and often begin from written narrative in making performative sculptural work that explores spatial relationship, gender and race. However, their collaborative practice is new. It took seed in 2019 during Stella Lee’s participation at HCL in Sungjae Lee’s Queer Asian workshop. Their distinctive practices are entering into dialogue now: Stella Lee’s reappropriated textiles, such as lingerie and stuffed animals, and performances which incorporate the body in stillness and in movement, with Sungjae Lee’s instigations through the personal body, emotion and memory.

The Project

Sungjae Lee and Stella Lee are using the Fellowship year to build a somatic movement and shrine building practice with the goal of a culmination series of interventions in domestic and public space in Chicago and Seoul, where Sungjae Lee is temporarily based. Their work time together involves movement and writings shared virtually on a weekly basis. They use these process-intensives to push or pull apart the various intersecting queer and feminist ideas surrounding Asian bodies, opening a passage toward an Asian futurity that relates to visibility, intimacy, and desire.

The supporting bough for this project is “Yellow Hairy Balls," an ongoing project by Sungjae Lee as a study of the relationship between race, fetish, and masculinity, and that began with the 2019 Queer Asian workshop. It specifically asks where queer Asian locates in the queer diaspora, and how it can be manifested through a performance, including the personal body accentuation of skin color and desire.

Sungaje Lee’s and Stella Lee’s collaborative practice aims to strike the balance, for contextual depth that does not essentialize a community, and for opening the futurity to the whole of queer Asian communities that do not generalize their various stories. To net the necessary perspectives, and in anticipation of the culmination series of interventions in domestic and public spaces, they are immersing in the critical readings of Todd A. Henry (Queer Korea), Cathy Park Hong(Minor Feelings: an Asian Reckoning ), and Jose Esteban Muñoz (Cruising Utopia), and other pivotal writers who trace back and archive the history of queer, Korean generations in order to dream about the better future for their visibility.

Artist Bios

Sungjae Lee is from Seoul, South Korea and is currently working between Seoul and Chicago. His multidisciplinary practice probes the relationship between societal fringes and normativity/mainstream in order to expose more visibility of marginalized groups. He received his BFA in Sculpture from Seoul National University, and has an MFA in Performance Art from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has presented his works globally in Korea, Sweden, Canada, New Zealand, and the US. His performance pieces have been shown in Emergency INDEX published by Ugly Duckling Press and A Research on Feminist Art Now by No New Work.

Stella Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea and is currently working in Chicago. Her multidisciplinary practice explores narratives of soul searching and belonging, and the spatial relationships surrounding femininity, intimacy, and power. Her work also includes moving meditations and teaching yoga to explore the experience of the body in space as a collective act of resistance and resilience. She received her BFA at Iowa State University in 2018 and has presented works at the Des Moines Social Club, Happy Gallery Chicago, and Oklahomo.