ZURICH.- Mai 36 Galerie announced the representation of Maia Ruth Lee (*1983, Busan, South Korea).
Maia Ruth Lee’s work explores the shifting landscapes of language, memory and identity within the context of migration and personal mythology. Born in South Korea, raised in Nepal, and having lived in cities as varied as New York and Salida, Colorado, she has developed a visual language that navigates the dislocation and fluidity of cross cultural experience.
Her practice spans photography, video, painting, and sculpture, examining lives shaped by precarity and unrootedness—where maps, atlases, and banners serve as markers of movement and, often, of loss. Through translation as a method, Lee moves her work across mediums, linking themes of borders, community, and language with material embodiments of carriers and acts of self-preservation. Lee’s work creates a passageway, forging new lexicons that give form to transient lives and their stories—moving beyond conventional notions of legibility and comprehension.
Maia Ruth Lee received a BFA from Hong Ik University in Seoul and attended the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver. She is currently pursuing a Masters degree in Migration Studies at University of San Francisco.
Lee has held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Colorado; Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, NY; Tina Kim Gallery, NY; François Ghebaly Gallery, LA; and Primary Nottingham, Nottingham, UK. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including the 2024 Prospect 6 Triennial, New Orleans; Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; 2019 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Fotografiska Museum, NY; Gio Marconi Gallery, Milan and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich. Lee was the recipient of the Gold Art Prize in 2021 and the Rema Hort Mann grant in 2017. Her work is held in the public collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Syracuse University Art Museum. Maia Ruth Lee is co-represented by François Ghebaly in Los Angeles and Tina Kim Gallery in New York.
