Josephine Lee
Sign in another language (series)
Studio 531 Architects
546 Herald St, Victoria BC
June – September 2021
Presenting Josephine Lee at Studio 531 Architects Satellite Gallery, located in downtown Victoria’s historic Old Town/Chinatown neighbourhood. Josephine’s installation marks the first iteration at this exciting new arts venue.
About the work:
Drawing from poetry, protest, and folklore, these text pieces are but two in an ongoing series that examine immigrant narratives of loss, violence, and displacement. Pulling from Lee’s personal experience moving throughout North America as a first-generation Korean immigrant, the work connects notions of home and heritage to the undocumented labor and dispossession experienced by people of color, individuals, families. In this era of gatekeeping national borders; witnessing the rise in violence directed towards immigrants and refugees; and confronting the systemic conditions of racial violence that persists within our countries, this work places the viewer in the midst of protest-like signs to confront their own understandings and measures of what it may mean to live with compassion and humanity.
Josephine Lee is a first-generation South Korean immigrant whose work is largely informed by a lifetime of movement throughout the United States and Canada. Lee holds graduate and undergraduate degrees in both science and fine arts. She is a recipient of the BC Arts Council Award, the University of British Columbia Medal for Fine Arts, and the President’s Scholarship for Parsons School of Design in New York. Recently, Lee was awarded the Oscar Kolin Fellowship, the Sparkbox Emerging Artist Residency, the Vera G. List Sculpture Award, and a Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist Award for a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta, Canada.
Lee currently reside within the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Find out more about Josephine’s art here: http://www.jjosephine.com/