"Chinatown Sailor Moon" by Doah Lee
On View: February 1st - 24th
Opening Reception: February 1st, 6pm - 10pm
Artist Talk: February 9th, 4pm
Closing Reception: February 24th, 2pm – 6pm
Sailor-Moon had her prime time in Asia, in her birth place. Sailor-Moon also had her prime time in America, but the American Sailor-Moon does not remember her time in Asia, and vice versa. Now, Sailor-Moons are meeting in Chinatown, connecting their hands, touching their palms. Fingers are weaving together their lives, and they are turning around, facing people through self-conscious eyes, showing how the outer world has been consuming and perceiving them in the reality.
The action is creating a coalition of absences in different spaces and time in the universes and is a reflection of the artist Doah Lee’s life. Self-dislocating herself from Korea to the U.S., her experiential process constructs a reality of what it means to live as a foreigner and Asian woman in America today. She explores and exploits cultural symbols through repetition in a practice that meditates on conflicted cultural translation, immigration, otherness, and femininity, interrogating issues of self-identification. She invokes her childhood to examine the time when images begin to wield influence over a person’s identity under socio-political and cultural pressures. She searches through the ways children speak, listen, see, and draw to find an inflection point, and to evince these pressures. In this exhibition, Chinatown Sailor-Moon, she invites the audience into an environment of sound, smell, sculpture, and images.
Doah Lee is an interdisciplinary visual artist based in Philadelphia. She was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea. She earned her MFA from University of Pennsylvania and her BFA with a concentration in Painting and Printmaking at the School of Art Institute of Chicago.Her work has exhibited in Virginia, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Seoul, South Korea. She has been a resident artist at Cheltenham Center of the Art. She is a curator and member of an artist-run exhibition space FJORD gallery and she teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia. This is Doah Lee’s first solo exhibition in Philadelphia.
www.doahlee.com
@doah.lee
Our Conversation with Doah Lee:
PG: Where are you from? Does place play a role in your work?
DL: I am from Seoul, South Korea. Absolutely, I believe where you grow up and spend your early childhood in certain socially constructed places affects the way you look at or absorb the world and affects how you perceive things. I spent all my teenage years in Seoul and then moved to U.S. I spent all my 20s here. I feel I am juggling everyday between these two different cultural systems. Sometimes, it makes me feel fragmented, not completely belonging anywhere, no home, no settlement, but then it expands my boundaries. I can be anything. Those experiences, I think, are consciously and unconsciously translated into my art and become major subject matter.
PG: Why do you make art? Was there a crucial moment when you decided to follow the path of an artist more rigorously?
DL: I think this is a really interesting question. Why do I make art? Well, thinking back to my early childhood and the first time I realized that I wanted to be an artist was when my kindergarten teacher asked me what I want to be. I was four or five years old and I said I want to be an artist. Every year school surveyed children asking them what they wanted to be. My answer never wavered. I always answer I want to be an artist.
Art making is just part of my life. It is my language. It is basically just speaking and communicating with my own language. Again, going back to the question why I make art, I think it is simply because it is the language that I am most comfortable with, and the one I feel more secure with than any other language that I speak.
PG: What are the key conceptual concerns in your practice, and where do you draw inspiration?
DL: Daily life and interacting with people in our society are my biggest inspirations. Sometimes, there is a moment that makes me examine my behavior and emotions and why I behaved that way I feel that way. I try to analyze and understand through my self-conscious eyes, but also it brings a lot of questions. Its context within our cultural world.
PG: How do you deal with the uncertainty inherent in the creative process?
DL: I take my time until I feel I am ready. I draw my ideas on paper and think about them as well. Then I take a break when I feel it is not right and when I feel unsure. I keep looking at my images and try to think critically about the visual language I have used. Also, I try to do more research; read related books and magazines, do internet searching and talking with friends. Just talking with friends and having normal daily life conversation help me to bring a new inspiration for my art.
PG: From Sailor Moon, laundry mat, Korean characters, to the reference of Chinatown, or the derogatory idiom “FOB”, which came around the 1800s-- how do you think your identity as a Korean artist living and working in the US in 2019, and what does Pan-Asia culture mean to you?
DL: Again, when I think deeply about my identity, I feel do not belong anywhere. It is hard to explain. I am not a Korean-American because I was not raised here, but now I feel I am not a Korean-Korean either because I have lived here over eleven years. This creates in me a feeling of confusion and insecurity. It also creates some loneliness. Growing up and living in different cultural spaces, I do experience a lot of conflicts in trying to define my true nature and understand my certain behaviors. Of course, people define me in a certain way based on my look within Asian female stereotypes in U.S., but my foreign quality keeps me open to the broader view of the world as an artist. My Pan-Asia culture is my comfort and root and at the same time, it challenges notions and norms inside of my identity.
PG: Have you gotten any surprising reviews/comments from the show? Would you like to share with us?
DL: When I gave an artist’s talk, I received a few questions about the scale of my art and some of the motifs that I am using in my work. During the show, many people came to me to talk about my art. They appreciated my work and wanted to let me know that it moved them, especially one of them told me it empowered her to handle conflicts she has. It was a meaningful time for me as an artist to listen and have interactions with people about my art. Jeff Katzin wrote an exhibition review, “Certainly Bold and Boldly Uncertain,” in Title Magazine, which was an honor and a great experience.
PG: You mentioned the idea of consumption was an important component of the work, and that is maybe most explicit in the cake paintings. Can you talk a little about why you are interested in consumption? What is being consumed? Who is doing the consuming?
DL: I am intrigued by the act of consuming. Someone makes a product. The product is designed for the consumer’s taste; producers consciously care what people like and what they need.
The producer is waiting for their products to be liked and chosen. However, I think about the products as having human emotions. They do not have choices and they are very passive. I think about women in the same way and their expectations in the terms of the Christmas cake story which originated in Korea in the 1990s. That is that women who were not married by twenty-five were no longer considered as young, they are past-ready for marriage. It was like having a Christmas cake that went stale. As a young child, this had an impact on me. Those critical views affect women and how they behave once they reach the perceived age of being too old to be married. Even though thoughts have been changed, I feel women still suffer from those traditional ideas. We should always challenge ourselves and speak up against those old-fashioned traditions.
PG: What’s your experience showing with Practice?
DL: It was great to work with all the Practice members and especially Keenan, the point person for my show. I had a lot of conversations with him about my ideas of how I want to install my pieces. This exhibition was the first time that I exhibited my large-scale painting which involved a lot of heavy installation parts, not only fabric-based sculpture, but also with stained glass pieces. So, it was important to have the right-sized exhibition space. Practice gallery gave me the freedom to design my exhibition in their space. It was a joy and I am glad I was able to share my work with the Philadelphia community.