Make of/Make do, 2016
Lee’s installations incorporate sculptural, photographic, and drawing traditions to consider ways in which place is created among changing urban and environmental conditions. The sculptures and installations she constructs are informed by her observations of daily life and through the collecting and reconfiguring of the materials that pass through it.
This solo exhibition marks Lee's first in Louisiana and is guest curated by Dr. Christopher Bennett, UL Lafayette Art History professor in the Department of Visual Arts. It is accompanied by a new publication by the museum, also authored by Bennett, which features an analysis and catalog of Lee's recent artworks.
Curatorial Statement:
Sandra Eula Lee makes use of ordinary, and at times site-specific, materials to construct two- and three- dimensional arrangements. Currently the director of the Expanded Sculpture Program at Kenyon College in Ohio, Lee uses materials salvaged from construction sites in her art. Working with materials gathered during travels through South Korea, China, and the United States, she configures work that explores the theme of the “garden”—principally as an East Asian formation—and the “ponds” often located within them.
As a former resident of five bustling cities—Goyang, Seoul, Xiamen, Beijing, and New York City—where Lee lived between 2000 and 2015, Lee experienced a larger atmosphere defined by accelerated modernization and continual construction. She was especially struck by small, ‘impromptu’ gardens, created and tended by anonymous civilians, located between the many construction zones and apartment blocks and along the peripheries of such places. Soon, she began to think about how the “garden” might be brought to bear on making a work of art.
As an artist Lee conceives the “garden” as a space of contemplation; it is also, like life itself, in her estimation, “improvised.” Inspired by more formal gardens, such as Soswaewon Garden in South Korea or The Master of Nets Garden in Suzhou, China, Lee is particularly drawn to the ponds located within gardens. She describes such a pond as “almost a kind of empty space, reflecting what’s around it.”
The exhibition Make of / Make do surveys Lee’s production from 1997 to 2014 and includes her most recent works of 2015-17. In these later pieces, the themes of her earlier “gardens” and “ponds” undergo projection onto the vertical plane of the wall and onto new landscape features, such as mountains.
Lee’s art is defined by a dynamic tension between the spontaneous and potentially endless process of making use of salvaged and commonly available materials—and the arrival at a finely-tuned, definitive external structure.