Yein Lee (b. 1988 KR) is a South Korean artist currently living and working in Vienna. After receiving a B.F.A. in Traditional Asian Painting from Hongik University, Lee received an MA in Object-Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She currently works as a university lecturer and assistant at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Lee’s practice operates through a methodology of continual becoming—an iterative, non-linear process wherein form, subjectivity, and spatial structure remain in negotiation. Her work engages a material ontology that privileges flux over fixity, generating environments that are at once corporeal and conceptual: porous, unruly, and suspended between states of emergence and dissolution. Across sculpture, installation, and performance, Lee constructs hybridized assemblages composed of salvaged quotidian materials, each fragment inscribed with the trace of prior use and reactivated through gesture, tactility, and recomposition.
These assemblages, neither fully found nor wholly crafted, register the contradictions of their making. The tension between the handmade and the discarded becomes a generative site—where personal narrative meets collective residue, and intimacy collides with material fatigue. Her work doesn’t resolve these contradictions; it inhabits them, reflecting a world where value is unstable and meaning is contingent.
In navigating the ambivalence of contemporary material culture, Lee contends with the seductions and failures of the commodity: its ephemerality, its excess, its deep entwinement with systems of labor, ecology, and capital.
Her compositions resist fixity. They are temporal bodies—fractured, precarious, and insistently alive—where fragility and abrasion are not breakdowns but modes of inquiry. As transient compositions, fluctuating roughness and fragility are at the forefront of a formal investigation. In their impermanence, they mark out a space for resistance, vulnerability, and critical reflection.
Her work has recently been presented internationally in group exhibitions at the 15th Gwangju Biennale, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Kunstverein Göttingen, Germany, Centre d'Art La Meute, Château - Centre d'Art Contemporain de la Ville d'Aubenas, Centre Culturel Suisse, France; Belvedere 21, Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna, among others.