Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

My practice hovers between image and object, memory and projection, presence and absence. Landscape and botany become contested forms of longing and belonging. Shaped by crossings, my practice considers oceanic and riverine perspectives to examine how ecology is entangled with colonial histories, migration, and diasporic formations. Through archival research, I rework landscapes and botanical forms that exist between archives, those transmitted through museums, family traditions, seasonal observations, and folk remedies. Light functions as a sculptural material in my engraving practice. Beginning with analogue photography, my work remains grounded in a sensitivity to the physical properties of materials. I create hybrid forms that straddle image and sculpture. Using handheld abrasive sculptural tools, I draw directly into aluminum, shaping the reflection of light to create images in flux, shimmering across engraved surfaces and lines, shifting with the viewer’s perspective, and inviting slow looking. When I engrave on aluminum, I work with both presence and absence, on a material once widely used for mass image reproduction and circulation. I want to turn an image into an afterimage: an airy photograph like a breath mark, a scar made luminous, a relic that remains fleeting. The engraving is not intended to be printed with ink, but to take the form of optically unstable images that resist fixity and can only be fully perceived through movement in light and space. Through...

Artwork