Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Video/Installation
Website: tinakimgallery.com
Maia Ruth Lee was born in 1983 in Busan, South Korea, and grew up between Kathmandu, Nepal and Seoul, South Korea; her parents worked as Bible translators who spent three decades with the Sherpa community in Nepal’s Solukhumbu region. She received a BFA from Hongik University in Seoul, studied at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada, and attended FABRICA, Benetton’s communication research center in Italy.
Lee arrived in New York City in 2011 and spent over a decade there building her practice, directing an arts nonprofit from 2016 to 2020 and exhibiting at venues including Jack Hanley Gallery, Salon 94, and Canada Gallery. In 2019 she participated in the Whitney Biennial with The Stranger (2018), a video installation later acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art. She received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant in 2017 and was among the inaugural recipients of the Gold Art Prize in 2021, a $25,000 award supporting AAPI and Asian diaspora artists. In spring 2020 she relocated to Salida, Colorado, where she produced the solo exhibition The Language of Grief at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2021), followed by solo shows at François Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles (2022, 2024) and Tina Kim Gallery in New York (2023), and a commissioned installation at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU (2024).
Lee now lives and works in San Francisco’s Richmond District with her husband, photographer Peter Sutherland, and their son, having moved to the city to pursue a master’s degree in Migration Studies while maintaining her studio practice.
Lee’s signature body of work, Bondage Baggage, began from her observations of the improvised, over-packed bundles carried by migrant laborers passing through Kathmandu. She wraps tarp, burlap, rope, tape, and accumulated used clothing and bedding into dense bundles, binds them in gridded patterns, applies India ink or acrylic ink across the surface, and then cuts away the rope and fabric — a process that transforms sculpture into painting and leaves behind traces of the binding as evidence of the accumulations and contours of a life in transit.
Across painting, sculpture, photography, and video, Lee treats maps, atlases, banners, and invented glyphs as wayfinding devices for a self shaped by migration, dispersion, and rootlessness. Language recurs as both subject and material — its capacity, and its failure, to carry experience across borders — and her recent work incorporates Korean and Buddhist Nepali ritual forms, including a traditional jesa-sang ancestor offering table, to hold space for grief, memory, and inherited tradition.
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