Christine Yerie Lee

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

I am a multidisciplinary artist working in video, performance, and drawing. Raised in the American South by parents from South Korea, my practice explores the performativity within identity-formation, using the body to articulate resistance to dominant power structures and generate imaginative narratives for the future. Drawing from East Asian and American folklore, global political histories, and viral phenomena, I build interconnected worlds that collide fantasy with reality as sites for cultural, psychological, and socio-political discovery. I collage disparate media forms—oral histories, film history, etymology, and personal memoir—to construct narratives I call active folklore. This process of conflation is a recurring strategy in my work: by colliding two or more cultural signs into one another, I produce a third that acknowledges its sources while engaging them critically. As a Korean American, I am interested in cross-cultural links between East Asia and the USA, and the influences of the Cold War on ideas of nationhood, authenticity, and desire. Through avatars and characters, I reexamine these notions by playing with embodiment and spectatorship as a form of agency, centering the potential of migratory flows and hybridizations. My costumes, props, and set designs are informed by these poetics and activated in my video works by myself, performers, musicians, and sometimes my family. Through worldbuilding and storytelling, I aim to illuminate parallel threads of...

Artwork