Maia Ruth Lee: Double Vision

Opening September 10, 2026, Tina Kim Gallery is pleased to present Double Vision, Maia Ruth Lee’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Interrogating migration as simultaneous perception, Lee conditions identity within multiple histories, temporalities, and systems of knowledge. Lee’s exhibition takes its title from Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture. The migrant’s double vision simultaneously inhabits both the place left behind and the place occupied as the condition for a complete understanding of the migrant’s life. Double vision becomes both a metaphor and a new way of working memory as material. Across both gallery spaces, Lee’s work expands and contracts image and sculpture, memory and record. Forms stack, unfold, mirror, and reassemble, building identity as a continuous accumulation, complicating the narrative of migration as one fixed point of origin.

Anchoring the exhibition is a series of new paintings from Lee’s Bondage Baggage methodology. The suitcase is a generative metaphor where luggage becomes more than functional objects of transport. They are vessels where memory, absence, expectation, and aspiration collide.

Lee’s double vision manifests as a physical experience, with every form existing alongside another version of itself. New sculptures with latex layers preserve the form and surface imprint of the bound bundle after its contents are released. Video stills of the artist’s family are sewn onto the expandable 이민가방’s colossal luggage form. A newly commissioned video installation draws from Lee’s family archive, incorporating home footage recorded by her parents in Nepal and Korea.

Deeply rooted in the distinct architectural and visual language of New York City, Lee revisits her steel glyphs from 2019–salvaged architectural fragments from the city. The assemblages occupy the space between word and sculpture, an open-ended code that remains vaguely familiar, yet stubbornly illegible.

Double Vision proposes history as a layered, omnidirectional, and omnitemporal experience even as it remains tethered to earthly forms. Mirrors, suitcases, sculptures, textiles, salvaged objects, and paintings are sites of doubled perception. Memory folds into itself, and the boundaries between past and present remain deliberately unresolved. Lee’s practice comprises an ever-expanding archive in a constant state of assembly, stacking, transporting, translating, and seeing.

About the artist

Maia Ruth Lee (b. 1983, Busan; lives and works in San Francisco) has held solo exhibitions at Primary Nottingham (UK), Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (NY), The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (CO), François Ghebaly Gallery (LA), and Mai 36 Galerie (CH). Lee has participated in numerous group exhibitions at institutions including Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Aspen Art Museum, as well as the Sky High Farm Biennial 2025 (NY); Prospect 6., New Orleans; and the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Lee received a BFA from Hongik University and attended the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada, and is currently enrolled in a Masters in Migration Studies program at the University of San Francisco. Lee was the recipient of the Gold Art Prize in 2021 and the Rema Hort Mann grant in 2017. Her work is held in the permanent collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Syracuse University Art Museum.

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