h o m e     
a r t i s t  s t a t e m e n t
c o n t a c t
 

\'_'/                                                                                                                                            a l l i e  l e e      

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Articulating diaspora is not simply a depiction of collective cultural experience, but an exploration of what is internalized and how an ethnic individual re-contextualizes culture by virtue of one`s own unique language, gesture, and memory. My work concerns linguistic and cultural ephemera, or, the way in which the voices I embody rarely exist simultaneously but actively alternate due to bilingualism and biculturalism. Through my practice in net.art, video, installation, and performance, I try to imagine fragments of myself that inhabit the space between the languages and cultures I embody. Positioning myself interstitially also generates a discourse between the physical and virtual spaces that materialize my work, which represent different human attitudes, ideas of mortality, and archival intent.

I am not limited to the languages I speak, the national cultures I engage in, my ethnicity, or my gender. While subject to a category in society, I am also endowed with the ability to experience a liminal time of transformation between my American and Korean personas. My work addresses how such transformation is not simply a switch that turns on and off but how each persona is present in the other. When one is not vocal, it is actually silenced or oppressed.

A significant portion of my work applies to this framework the idea of mourning death and how the experience of loss and ritual heightened my sense of cultural indeterminacy. By appropriating elements from established ritual, I work with media sculptures that change in form, deteriorate, or have generative elements, which alludes to witnessing terminal illness, reacting to death, and losing a clear sense of one`s cultural identity as a result. I often allow the physicalization of my work to occur naturally through several trials and versions of materializing concepts. Working in such a processual manner is effective for me to work across different media simultaneously or to synthesize media forms.