Hee Lee

Master of Fine Arts

Bio

Education
Master of Fine Arts in Performance, SAIC
Master of Arts in Drama, Cheongju University, Korea
Bachelor of Arts in Performing Arts, Cheongju University, Korea

Awards/Achievements
Merit Scholarship, Ox-Bow
Semi-Finalist, Claire Rosen & Samuel Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists
Anna Louise Raymond Fellowship

Performances and Exhibitions

2012
Ping and Pong, IMPACT Performance Festival, SAIC
Blow it!, Diverse Universe Performance Festival, Dino Eli Gallery, New York
Blow it!, More About You & Me, Grace Exhibition Space, New York
Blow it!, midwinter, Defibrillator Performance Space, Chicago
Flânerie, Fundraising event, Links Hall, Chicago
The Shell, New Wave Ladies Night, Carousel Space, Chicago

2011
In Braids, New Blood V Performance Festival, SAIC, Chicago
I Received Orders Not to Move, Shanghai Rockbund Museum, Shanghai, China
Tuition Laundering, Asian Students and Young Artists Art Festival, Seoul, Korea
Invasion, East Meets West, Jumbotron Herald Square, New York
Invasion, Touch, Defibrillator Performance Space, Chicago
Invasion, Sexier, Zhou Brother Art center, Chicago

Experience at SAIC

As an international student far from my home, SAIC has become my primary community, laboratory, and space for reflection and creation. At this moment, my interactions with the students, faculty, exhibitions, and Chicago itself, have become an essential and welcome source for many of my ideas and thoughts about our world and my own practice. My work was born out of this moment in time and the SAIC community.

Personal Statement

My performances present an immersive environment and allow an audience to investigate a constructed space and time. I situate myself in relation to objects and architectural sites in order to release an unforeseen potentiality within these elements, which creates conflicts and complex associations with and for the viewer.

Current Interests

In my body-centered work, I explore the private and public manifestations of the female Asian body where isolated actions transform into symbol, metaphor, metonym, and formal structures within the larger context of socio-cultural power relations, particularly as they pertain to imbalance, inequality, and injustice in Korean and American society. As a woman growing up in the patriarchal power structure of South Korea, my personal experiences incited an active engagement with feminist discourse; moreover, as an alien, living an extended period away from home, my awareness as “the other” provoked further research into the subject of cultural marginalization.