Susan Lee-Chun: Remnants at Play | Feb 25 - Apr 1

November 27 - February 15, 2023

WAAM is pleased to present Susan Lee Chun: Remnants at Play, an immersive exhibition exploring the studio archives of multidisciplinary Miami-based artist Susan Lee-Chun. Remnants at Play examines how material culture can shape and influence dominant cultural assumptions. How do objects derive meaning and accrue their own identity in a world where the proliferation of material culture is exponential? And how do cross-cultural consumption of these objects and associated rituals affect social reality? In Remnants at Play, we journey alongside a collection of artifacts, soft sculptures, found objects, textiles, and other exploratory objects that are foundational in Lee-Chun’s artmaking. These artifacts and ‘remnants’ bear witness to the various guises and fictional personas adopted by Lee-Chun throughout her practice and are integral markers of her interest and excavations in cultural and social psychology. 

 

The archival materials on view at WAAM span over fifteen years and reference bodies of work produced from 2004 to the present. By fusing installation, video, and performance-based work in playful, nuanced, and multilayered narratives, she dissects the premise of cultural formations and patterns. Lee-Chun exposes the blindspots that are so prevalent in these conversations and offers the viewer multiple vantage points to grapple with the historical biases and distortions that are inherent in the popular imagination. In her early performance-based work, the use of textiles and soft sculptures serve as a camouflaging mechanism to comment on how cultural displacement, assimilation, and acculturation can manifest in marginalized communities. Later works use a museological framework to investigate how the language of colonialism, appropriation, and exploitation operate in assigning value and meaning to objects that are exported en masse. Lee-Chun purposely obscures subject/object relationships so we can see firsthand how easy it is to succumb to misperceptions related to cultural stereotypes. 

Susan Lee-Chun was born 1976 in Seoul, South Korea, and currently lives and works in Miami. Since studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2004, MA), Susan Lee-Chun has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad – Herning Kunstmuseum, Denmark; Pacific Asia Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Miami Dade College’s Museum of Art + Design, MOCA Detroit, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, and MoMA PS1. She has held residencies at the Bemis Center in Omaha, NE, Three Walls in Chicago, IL, and McColl Center for Visual Art, Charlotte, North Carolina. Her work is in private and public collections, including the Perez Art Museum, Miami and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.