Maia Ruth Lee

"But human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, capable only of fractured perceptions."

—Salman Rushdie, "Imaginary Homelands," 1982

Tina Kim Gallery is pleased to present Double Vision, Maia Ruth Lee’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Interrogating migration as simultaneous perception, Lee conditions identity within multiple histories, temporalities, and systems of knowledge. Lee’s exhibition takes its title from Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture. The migrant’s double vision simultaneously inhabits both the place left behind and the place occupied as the condition for a complete understanding of the migrant’s life. Double vision becomes both a metaphor and a new way of working memory as material. Across both gallery spaces, Lee’s work expands and contracts image and sculpture, memory and record. Forms stack, unfold, mirror, and reassemble, building identity as a continuous accumulation, complicating the narrative of migration as one fixed point of origin.

Anchoring the exhibition is a series of new paintings from Lee’s Bondage Baggage methodology. The suitcase is a generative metaphor where luggage becomes more than functional objects of transport. They are vessels where memory, absence, expectation, and aspiration collide.

Lee’s double vision manifests as a physical experience, with every form existing alongside another version of itself. New sculptures with latex layers preserve the form and surface imprint of the bound bundle after its contents are released. Video stills of the artist’s family are sewn onto the expandable 이민가방’s colossal luggage form. A newly commissioned video installation draws from Lee’s family archive, incorporating home footage recorded by her parents in Nepal and Korea.

Deeply rooted in the distinct architectural and visual language of New York City, Lee revisits her steel glyphs from 2019–salvaged architectural fragments from the city. The assemblages occupy the space between word and sculpture, an open-ended code that remains vaguely familiar, yet stubbornly illegible.

Double Vision proposes history as a layered, omnidirectional, and omnitemporal experience even as it remains tethered to earthly forms. Mirrors, suitcases, sculptures, textiles, salvaged objects, and paintings are sites of doubled perception. Memory folds into itself, and the boundaries between past and present remain deliberately unresolved. Lee’s practice comprises an ever-expanding archive in a constant state of assembly, stacking, transporting, translating, and seeing.