Kai Chung Lee

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

Lee Kai Chung’s artistic practice is rooted in an inquiry into everyday coloniality, dialectically examining the multitude of Asian subjectivity through the fluid interplay between human condition and affect. Within the volatile exchanges between individuals and power structures, Lee traces the potentiality of agency by attuning to the shared vulnerabilities between humans and more-than-humans. Drawing from the structural voids within post-colonial archival systems, Lee has developed an artistic research methodology that encompasses moving image, critical fabulation, archival practice, publishing and public engagement. His practice translates the intricate layers within historical interstices, allowing them to resonate with the present. Since 2017, he has explored the motif of Displacement through a hexalogy of research-led projects, scrutinising how geopolitical infrastructures regulate lives and matter. In As Below, So Above (2023), he transforms spiritual ‘displacement’ into a method for withdrawing from predicament. This logic informs his moving image practice: eschewing conventional film production workflow, he mobilises personal archives to evoke a sense of spatio-temporal entanglement and anachrony. Furthermore, Lee extends his focus to ‘affective infrastructures’, dissecting the ‘coldness’ of the Cold War—a deliberately naturalised collective state of emergency rather than frozen military stalemate. Tree of Malevolence (2024) reveals the biopolitical logic...

Artwork