Yik Heng Lee

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

I weave textiles as a form of storytelling, tracing the lives of what fabric has touched. My most recent works render the ordinary things a room is made of, woven at their actual size. Each piece begins as an oil painting of a furniture piece or interior scene, then is scanned, color-indexed, and encoded thread by thread before it is woven: the room becomes a painting, the painting becomes code, and the code becomes cloth. Up close the work is nothing but interlacements; a few steps back it is an interior again. In that short walk I want the viewer to feel how much of a person the ordinary quietly holds—whether a life can be left in a room, even one where he could not openly be himself, and read there later by someone who knows how to look. My practice responds to a longstanding claim, sharpened by Rosalind Krauss, that the grid is anti-narrative—a surface sealed against story. I take the opposite position, drawing on the grid as the fundamental structure of textile craft. Weaving does not borrow the grid; weaving is the grid, and the loom has always held lived reality rather than abstracting it away—through color, material, notation, and woven construction as image. My practice reads woven patterns as structured signs whose repeated form follows each advance in weaving equipment and technique. I treat repetition, after Deleuze, not as reproduction but as occurrence: a structure that insists while permitting difference—the site, I believe, where story sits.

Artwork