Sangmin Lee
Bio: I was born and raised in St. James Town (Toronto, Canada). It is one of the densest high-rise communities in North America, and an offshoot of Towers in the Park, a model of modern dwellings invented by Le Corbusier. With thoughts of utopia, it was meant to accommodate large populations with little room else for infrastructure and ornamentation. Despite its shortcomings, St. James Town is now one of the most ethnically rich neighbourhoods in Canada and is sometimes known as "the world within a block." Somewhere between these concrete enclosures and lived space, between drywall and parquet floor tiles, are the stories of cultural survival that centers my practice. Here, I look to process, the unfixed, the tangential, and beyond—to wander peripherally into the margins and towards expansive narratives.
http://www.sangminl.com
Instagram: @sangminl
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: My practice is a meeting of imaginations— somewhere between architecture and ornamentation, in the margins of lived experience and around the edges of nostalgia, as nostalgia without memory.
I create sculptural propositions drawing from a collection of objects that consider the processes from studio, exhibition, storage, daily life, and beyond.
If the process to object is a story of becoming, then I drift along the tangents of its making. It is to make insulation foam into water, then flesh of fruit, back to substrate and on. To make borders into branches, once closed systems porous, overlapping— to create abundance with less, expanding possibilities, as non-linear, as pluralities, and even contradictions. Collapsible architecture is re/arranged with tangential objects to propose a constellation amid uncertainty. They are ecosystems unrooted. Still lives in transition, displaced, and arranged again seeking stillness. While their histories become lost in translation, in its place new stories emerge.
My current interests begin within this contradiction between the weight of carrying histories forward and the adaptability necessary for continuity.
Nostalgia without memory (Joint compound, white glue, printer paper, inkjet transfer, watercolor, rebar tie-wire, glass, wood, brass, and a loofah, 2021–2023)
First Year Exhibition
Chaekgeori Revisited (An arrangement from making space for others), (60" x 48" x 48', Mixed media including but not limited to; drywall compound, insulation foam, rebar tie wire, clay, watercolor, popcorn ceiling texture, aluminum cast, and concrete)
