Hollis Taggart is pleased to announce the addition of artist Hayoon Jay Lee to its Contemporary roster. New York-based South Korean multimedia artist Hayoon Jay Lee’s representation follows the success of her first solo show with the gallery earlier this year, Fields of Vision, which was the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s rice-based multimedia work to date. Lee's work will be featured in Hollis Taggart’s summer exhibition Of the Past and Present: Estates and Contemporary Artists at Hollis Taggart, a comprehensive two-floor exhibition demonstrating the breadth of artists represented by the gallery, on view from June 29 through August 25, 2023.

“We’re very excited to continue expanding our roster and to welcome Hayoon Jay Lee to our growing community of artists at Hollis Taggart Contemporary,” said Hollis Taggart. “Lee joins the gallery just in time for a very special exhibition, Of the Past and Present, which will provide a unique opportunity to view works by all of the gallery’s artists at the same time. This show marks the first time we have exhibited all of our artists together, and we’re looking forward to seeing what visual dialogues are generated by this joint presentation.”

Hayoon Jay Lee explores the tension between indulgence and abnegation as it exists in the mind and body, as well as on a sociopolitical level. Her work locates points of contact between Korean material tradition and Western avant-garde vocabulary, by making particular use of rice as object, motif, commodity, and metaphor. A nutritional staple and building block of civilizations, as well as a marker of socioeconomic differences, rice allows Lee to conceptually play with points of conflict, oscillating between attraction and repulsion, between the east and the west, with the aim of ultimately encouraging reflection on the different ways our conditions and fates are interlinked.

Influenced by a wide range of artists including Michelangelo, Rodin, Ana Mendieta, Ann Hamilton, and Isamu Noguchi, Lee works in a variety of media such as painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and video. Her paintings in particular contain figures embedded in rice forms, the countless yet clearly defined grains suggesting infinite regeneration. In her sculptural works, rice is transformed into a pyramid or grid of 3,000-handcrafted rice “bowls” that speak of both longing and fulfillment, as well as Buddhist concepts of suffering and Enlightenment. Lee's installations may also take the shape of mounds of rice occupying vast spaces underneath hanging rice sacks. These emotion-laden landscapes lay just beyond our reach; the extensive fields of rice seem to glow with their own inner light, yet each element of these fields is formed by a single grain tentatively holding onto its place in the larger macrocosmic setting.

Hayoon Jay Lee was born in Daegu, South Korea in 1962, and earned a B.F.A. in sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2007 and M.F.A. from the Rinehart School of Sculpture at MICA in 2009. She has exhibited her work widely, both nationally and internationally. Lee lives and works in New York City.

###

For press inquiries, please contact Aga Sablinska at aga.sablinska@gmail.com or +1 862.216.6485.