Art Forum: Making Room with Yona Lee

This week in Art Forum hear from Artspace Studio resident and internationally acclaimed artist Yona Lee, in conversation with Dr Soo-Min Shim. Lee and Soo-Min Shim will discuss Lee’s recent projects, her approach to site-responsive practice, and insights into her work over the past 16 years.

Lee is based in Seoul, South Korea and Auckland Aotearoa, yet her site-responsive stainless-steel sculptures and installations resonate with audiences transnationally. Her works questions ideas of travel, diaspora, and migration, speaking to the material effects of globalisation and the politics of built space. Her welded stainless steel installations and sculptures, combined with quotidian domestic and urban objects, playfully transform gallery spaces surrealistically. Her work has recently been the subject of solo commissions and museum exhibitions internationally: in South Korea, New Zealand and Australia, including the Busan Biennale 2020, South Korea; 15^th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, France; and 2016 Changwon Sculpture Biennale. Yona Lee is represented by Fine Arts, Sydney.

Dr Soo-Min Shim is a sessional lecturer at NAS and UNSW. She received her PhD in Art History at ANU. She has written for several academic publications including World Art, Art & The Public Sphere, Southeast of Now, Refract. She has worked at Art Monthly Australasia, at NAVA, the MCA and was a director at Firstdraft Gallery. She is currently on the editorial board of Palgrave Macmillan’s book series on Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics and a 2026 Research Fellow at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea.

Image: Yona Lee at Fine Arts Sydney. Photo by Zan Wimberley.