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 revolves around a system of becoming—an ever-shifting process of redefinition, where form, self, and structure are in constant negotiation. Her work conjures a corporeal network: porous, unruly, and always in flux, suspended between cycles of growth and decay. Through installations, sculptures, and performances, Lee constructs hybrid environments composed of salvaged, everyday materials—each fragment bearing the weight of its past use, reactivated through touch, gesture, and recomposition.
These assemblages, neither fully found nor wholly made, 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.
These assemblages, neither fully found nor wholly made, 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.