The Bronx Museum 2025 AIM Fellow
Sangmin Lee
ARTIST STATEMENT
Sangmin Lee (he/they) reimagines personal and historical narratives through memories’ paradoxical potential to become object. Using various material processes, Lee creates objects that iteratively extend from the slippery ends of their own meaning—becoming a lineage of objects that gradually lose resemblance to one another.
Here, Lee speculates on the uncertain spaces between past and present, as mythmaking. Visually tracing how we extend memories to fill absence, as the lies we tell ourselves and truths beyond recollection.
Recent works are primarily made using drywall compound, rebar tie-wire, printer paper, and inkjet printer image transfers. Modern processes used in-between: to fill cracks, hold ink, and tie together. While once personal, these materials only remain to echo the decaying frameworks that narrow views of progress.
Going against its limitations, Lee creates a diversity of colors and forms. Layering drywall compound into bodies. Stretching an image out beyond its 8.5” x 11” borders.
Biography
Sangmin Lee was born and raised by a single mother in St. James Town (Toronto), the densest high-rise community in Canada. It is an offshoot of Towers in the Park, a model of modern dwellings invented by Le Corbusier. With thoughts of utopia, it was meant to accommodate large populations with little room for infrastructure and ornamentation. While first developed for a young white middle class, its poor design eventually led it to become community housing and a hub for newcomers. Despite its shortcomings, St. James Town is now one of the most ethnically rich neighborhoods in Canada and is sometimes known as “the world within a block.”
Somewhere between these concrete enclosures and lived space are the stories of cultural survival that center Lee’s practice. Here, Lee look to process—the unfixed, the tangential, and beyond—to wander peripherally into the margins and towards expansive narratives.
Lee was awarded a 2025 AIM Fellowship at The Bronx Museum.
