MAIA RUTH LEE
The Stranger, 2018 Video, color, sound, 23:45 min. Whitney Museum of American Art Purchase, with funds from the Film and Video Committee 2020.104
Colorado-based Maia Ruth Lee’s The Stranger (2018) performs a complex remapping, in a survey video shot by Lee’s father in the late 1980s, during his linguistic field work in the Himalayan mountains, where the family lived. Lee’s father’s monologue from the footage is synced with English subtitles from the artist’s own journal, written when Lee returned to Nepal as an adult and a mother. Questions of identity and family are bound up in the languages that surround her— Korean, Nepalese, English—and the invisible bond articulated in the slippage between what is written and spoken. For this presentation, Lee—who relocated from New York to Colorado during the pandemic—has created a site-specific environment including baggage sculptures that operate as floor seating, a ceiling-hung sculpture lit with red light, and text on the wall that reads “To bring me back home, to where I must belong.” 고향 [gohyang] is the Korean word closest to the word “home” that directly translates to “birthplace” or “hometown.” In the words of the artist: “There are so many things that we need as humans for the feeling of connection. Time, space, touch, and emotions all round up to the experience of an identity. For an immigrant who is becoming an American one battles with choosing sides, but the layers of that experience are essentially the language of a diasporic identity. I am back in the mountains, half way across the world from my mountains, but it speaks the same language. I bring my baggage, I unpack my baggage, I am home.”
ADDITIONAL WORKS:
< 고향 > , 2022 Decal, rope, India ink, red gel spotlight. Dimensions variable Courtesy the artist <Bondage Baggage Check-in> , 2022 Tarp, tape, rope. Dimensions variable Courtesy the artist
Installation views: Maia Ruth Lee, The Stranger , 2018, in Mountain / Time, Aspen Art Museum, 2022. Photo: Carter Seddon
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