"My slanted eyes betray my Western tongue, and in this yellow body of mine I have deeply understood the weight of longing and belonging. My pathway into art came from the necessity to forge a pathway towards representation. My recent works utilize collaging and sewing as a method of bringing together multiple cultures, identities, and interests into a cohesive representation of self. It allows me to abstract – to fragment, reassemble, and re-narrate – the anxious foils of a queer body existing in immigrant spaces. To represent not one, but the countless possibilities of identities that were tucked away and rendered invisible and through shifting between representation and [queer] abstraction, mirror the familiar processes of code-switching as a method of existing. My abstraction comes from a lived experience of codifying parts of my identity that could not be represented in my reality. In approaching my practice, I first ask myself a question: what reality is being depicted in that moment? In understanding that the queer, undocumented immigrant experience necessitated existing within countless iterations of the visible self, my work in abstraction is a performance of repetition, of anonymity, and of telling a story. Coming from a place of representation, my process of abstraction pays close attention to transient moments when critical references to representation are dissolved, and how this obscurity shifts our relationship to the image left behind.
My practice, and the breadth of my interests, tells a fragmented story constantly reassembling itself – a story of how a boy grew into his body and into his home. A story about migrating, and the rituals and labors of that journey. A story about feeling the politicized, fetishized, and abstracted body so deeply long before learning the vocabulary to describe it. A story about dreaming and finally waking up."
Biography:
Timothy Hyunsoo Lee is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores the relationship between bodies, borders and rituals. Born in Seoul, South Korea and raised in New York City, he received his B.A. in Neuroscience, Biology and Studio Art from Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT) and his MFA in computational arts from Goldsmiths, University of London (UK). Looking at his practice through a kaleidoscopic lens that includes multicultural perspectives and both analog and technological processes, his works reference fortresses, imagined landscapes, fleshy bodies, and the transient moment in-between, to highlight the tumultuous experiences of immigration, of othering, and what belonging means within these communities as a queer body. He references legacies of history and tradition and often subverts their presentation through queer abstractions and other forms of deterioration – both naturally occurring but also forced.
Timothy’s works have been exhibited widely at venues such as the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Orlando Museum of Art, the Studio Museum, The Wallach Art Gallery of Columbia University, The YoungArts Foundation Gallery and La Casa Encendida, with a public project with the MTA Arts & Design (New York). He is represented in private and public collections around the world, including Facebook, The MTA Arts & Design, The Luciano Benneton Foundation, The Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, The Basu Foundation for the Arts, and Fundacion DOP.
Learn a bit more about Timothy's practice and research influences through this 2024 interview with the MFA Boston for the exhibition Hallyu! The Korean Wave
Currently represented by Sabrina Amrani Gallery (Madrid, Spain)
You can also find available works through Artsy
Instagram @timmyhlee
Email: atelierhyunsoo@gmail.com