Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee
Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee
Canton Girl in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2024
Archival inkjet print on canvas, plastic & stainless steel zip-ties
72" x 96" x ~18"
Courtesy of the artist
Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee (b. 1992, Hong Kong; lives and works in New York) holds a BFA, MFA from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and an MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been exhibited at WMA and HART haus (HK, 2024); Kyoto Art Center (Kyoto, 2023); Tai Kwun Contemporary (HK, 2022); and The Listening Biennial (Berlin, 2021). Commissions include Art Promotion Office (HK, 2021), Peer to Peer: UK/HK (2020), and Hong Kong International Photo Festival (2018–2020). Featured in ArtAsiaPacific, Harvard Advocate, Artomity, and SCMP, Lee was a finalist for KG+SELECT and the Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2023) and won the WMA Master Award (HK, 2019). She has participated in art residencies in New York, Vienna, and Taipei.
Lee approaches images sculpturally, tactility, and relationally to address the disappearance of histories and memories. Her practice interweaves concepts and forms, using both organic and industrial materials, public and private realms, and personal and collective connections to create grounds that trace time. She interrogates cultural dislocation, itinerant belongings, and double colonization, employing images and materiality to evoke both vulnerability and resistance.
Her research into Canton Girl portraits began at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she first interned in the Asian Art department. Confronted with both the presence and absence of information within institutions, she turned to expanded archives—rice in seed banks, postcards on eBay—to construct alternative narratives.
One Face on Thousands Postcards (2024–25) uses three postcards as a lens to investigate power dynamics in image reproduction and construction of the “other.” By tracing the successive alterations of re-coloring and re-captioning an identical portrait, the work sheds light on the veiled history of Mui Tsai—girls who were sold as servants and sent from the port of Hong Kong to San Francisco in the 19th century. The “rice-pixel” face highlights material environments intertwined with world fairs, global trade, empire-building, and immigration.