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Maia Ruth Lee

Maia Ruth Lee's work explores the evolving shape of language, memory, and identity within the context of migration, diaspora, and personal mythology. Born in South Korea, raised in Nepal, and having lived in cities as varied as New York and Salida, Colorado, she has developed a visual language that seeks to reconcile the dislocation and fluidity of cross-cultural experience. Her practice spans photography, video, painting, and sculpture, and investigates lives shaped by precarity and a state of un-rootedness—maps, atlases, and banners become devices that call to mind a life of movement, and often, loss. Using translation as an apparatus, Lee transmutes her works between mediums, connecting themes of borders, community, and language with embodiments of carriers and self-preservation through process and materials. Lee’s work opens up a passageway, forging new lexicons that give form to lives of transience and their stories, beyond immediate and accepted forms of legibility and comprehension.

  • Maia Ruth Lee, B.B.Nearing 1-7, 2025

    acrylic ink on canvas
    54.33 x 67.72 in (138 x 172 cm)

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  • Maia Ruth Lee, B.B.Nearing 1-10, 2025

    acrylic ink on canvas
    55.12 x 67.72 in (140 x 172 cm)

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  • Maia Ruth Lee, B.B.Nearing 1-4, 2025

    acrylic ink on canvas
    42.91 x 36.61 in (109 x 93 cm)

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  • Maia Ruth Lee, B.B.Nearing 1-2, 2025

    acrylic ink on canvas
    35.43 x 36.61 in (90 x 93 cm)

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  • Maia Ruth Lee, B.B.Nearing 1-11, 2025

    acrylic ink on canvas
    36.22 x 42.13 in (92 x 107 cm)

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  • Maia Ruth Lee, B.B.Nearing 1-6, 2025

    acrylic ink on canvas
    27.17 x 27.95 in (69 x 71 cm)

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  • Maia Ruth Lee, Bondage Baggage Thread II, 2024

    tarp, rope, tape, used clothing, and bedding
    28.35 x 22.05 in (72 x 56 cm)

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  • Maia Ruth Lee, B.B.M 2-20, 2023

    ink on canvas
    60.63 x 59.45 in (154 x 151 cm)

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  • Maia Ruth Lee, B.B.S. 2-4, 2023

    ink on canvas
    28.74 x 28.74 in (73 x 73 cm)

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