el n.k. lee is a visual artist working in the field of expanded painting. By dissecting the traditional materials of painting she conflates form and subject to critique how race and gender becomes viewable on the body. As a provocation of even her own identity as a mediated selfhood, she suggests that these visual grammars can be shifted through suspension and accumulation; the loading and unloading of symbolic meaning attributed to the concretization of subjectivity. Whether looking to how national identity forms the individual; ethnic signifiers shape one’s personhood; or a sexual encounter unfolds into immobility, her practice asks: Am I subject, and the painting object; is the painting subject, and I the object; does the object complete me?

Based in Chicago, IL; Born 1996, Los Angeles
MFA, University of Chicago, DoVA
BA, University of California, Berkeley, Ethnic Studies

Language is flesh because it is borne from flesh… the body is forever of it.
                                                                                                   - Pope.L