Reviews + Press
With powers of porcelain, Ahn Lee spins Cantonese folklore futurism
48Hills | By: Mary Corbin | October 6, 2022
Through a blend of historical research, deep introspection of cultural identity, and a conceptual interdisciplinary process, the work of artist Ahn Lee emerges triumphant.
Lee grew up in Los Angeles and came to the Bay Area at the age of 18 to study at UC Berkeley. The artist has lived here ever since, except for the two years spent attending UCLA while working on a PhD.
“I currently live in East Oakland, which I love,” Lee tells 48hills. “My sister lives just four minutes away from me.”
Growing up as a queer, nonbinary person (Lee uses the pronouns she/they) in the US in a family who escaped the Chinese cultural revolution and British colonial hold of Hong Kong, Lee’s childhood was littered with altars. They served as a means of connection to her hometown of Sunwui (also known as Xinhui), a district of Jianmen that was a major 19th century port.
Meet All The BIPOC Artists Featured At UC Berkeley's 52nd MFA Graduate Exhibition
By: Kyrie Sismaet | July 5, 2022
Ahn Lee cleverly employs traditional Chinese lanterns and other motifs to illuminate the otherwise forgotten feminine and queer Cantonese histories. This hanging piece exposes the fraught history and racist relationship San Francisco once had with Chinese Americans and immigrants, from silk worms, to sex work, and more.
2021 MURPHY AND CADOGAN CONTEMPORARY ART AWARDS EXHIBITION CELEBRATES THE FUTURE OF BAY AREA ARTS
SAN FRANCISCO FOUNDATION | JULY 30, 2021
The Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Award is given to one MFA student of exceptional caliber with great artistic promise. This year’s Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy awardee is Ahn Lee of University of California, Berkeley whose interdisciplinary practice of ceramics, media and performance relies on a combined methodology of autobiographical re-making and research on the Cantonese diaspora…
Museum of Craft and Design, “Call and Response” Artist Ahn Lee
Museum of Craft and Design | May 2021
In January 2020, Lee and their sister took their mom to Hong Kong to visit their family for the Lunar New Year. It was the first time they had been back for the New Year since they immigrated–tickets were cheap due to the protests. Upon arrival, they wore masks in solidarity with the protestors, though masks were banned for this reason. When they left in February, masks were mandated for protection…
Studio Visit: Ahn Lee with Ruth Asawa and the new material cultures of the Pandemic Years.
by el 李 | March 2021
In an era that will be defined by the internal experience - indoors, in our bodies, in adjacency or contrast to illness and dying - Ahn busied herself in her studio, casting hundreds of copies of surgical masks in porcelain. “This is futility,” they would bashfully comment to me “People are out in hospitals risking their lives and I’m making nothing useful… masks out of porcelain,” an ironic rebuff.
To write on COVID-19 within the still ‘emergent’ state of emergency of a pandemic is to be beheld to a dynamically shifting field of optics. The art objects produced in this era are ever more presently caught in an entanglement between the charged present and the desire for a consumptive poetic of crisis which reifies our personal experience and identity without calling for a transformation of this (national) trauma. While Ahn seeks towards an understanding of the present, it is not such an easy one….