Kay Seohyung Lee, courtesy of the artist and Yiwei Gallery
Join Yiwei Gallery in Booth A17 for a conversation with artist Kay Seohyung Lee.
Can’t make it to the booth? The talk will be streamed on Instagram Live.
Open to all Intersect Aspen ticket holders.
Kay Seohyung Lee (b. 1995, Seoul) lives and works in Philadelphia. She received an MFA from University of Pennsylvania in 2021.
Lee grew up near the US Army Garrison Yongsan Base, immersed in the aftermath of the Korean War. Raised bilingual, she moved to the US at fourteen, grappling with her identity and constant feelings of otherness. Lee's work reflects the absurdity, chaos, and solitude of her lived experience. She explores themes of the femme body, gender, sexuality, religion, culture, language, as they unfold through humanrelationships. Across her work, Lee treats absurdity not as a rupture but as a condition—a constant presence shaped by systems, habits, and histories.
In the series Tables and Hellscapes, Lee captures moments in which perception becomes fragmented and meaning gives way to sensory excess. The works teeter between clarity and disorientation, chaos and nonsense, magnifying the absurdity embedded in our daily lives—especially for those who live between different cultures and geographies. Similarly, in her Art Fair series, Lee turns her gaze to infrastructure of the art world. Figures drift through exhibition halls—artists, curators, and bored spectators alike—caught in between viewing, evaluating, and moving on. Art fairs are, in their own sense, sites of statelessness: participants from around the world gather temporarily in cavernous white-walled labyrinths.
Lee has had solo exhibitions at Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia; Insa Art Plaza Gallery, Seoul; and Bincan Gallery, Seoul. Group exhibitions include Paradigm Gallery, Philadelphia; Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles; Yiwei Gallery, Venice, CA; Blah Blah Gallery, Philadelphia; and Hot Bed, Philadelphia. She lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.