Sage Jeehee Kang & Minjung Lee

Architecture of Longing marks the culmination of the second edition of In Practice, Picture Theory’s artist residency program, featuring artists Minjung Lee and Sage Jee Hee Kang. Developed over the course of the summer, the residency provides artists with dedicated time and space to develop new work alongside an ongoing program of studio visits, critical dialogue, and exchange with invited curators, artists and arts professionals.

Bringing together new bodies of work by Lee and Kang, Architecture of Longing curated by Carson Woś considers how memory, place, and personal history shape our understanding of self. Both artists examine the distance between experience and recollection, using material and spatial reconstruction as a means of navigating displacement, cultural translation, and belonging.

Kang draws upon family photographs, inherited histories, and traditional Korean hanji paper to explore lineage and the ways personal and generational memory are carried forward. Lee reconstructs fragments of familiar interiors—baseboards, electrical outlets, architectural thresholds, and other seemingly ordinary details—to create psychologically charged spaces suspended between memory and physical reality.

Together, their works consider the ways we reconstruct places, histories, and relationships that can no longer be fully accessed, asking what remains when distance—geographic, temporal, or emotional—separates us from what once felt familiar.