Yein Lee

The exhibition explores material instability, spatial uncertainty, and the transience of forms under conditions of environmental and societal stress. Set against an accelerating ecological crisis, ongoing geopolitical volatility, and informed by the artist’s own experience of migration, the exhibition traces identity as a process of multiplicity and transformation, oscillating between violent disruption and stabilising alliance.

Lee works with polymer gypsum, epoxy putty, and found steel to create assemblages that function as trace bodies: gypsum casts taken from materials and surfaces in precarious states, carrying their instability and transience as imprint. Her work occupies a space between spectral vigour and material fatigue, forming tense atmospheric landscapes of crude materiality and poetic emergence.

Yein Lee is a South Korean artist who currently lives and works in Vienna, where she teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. After receiving a B.F.A. in Traditional Asian Painting from Hongik University, Lee earned an M.A. from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Lee’s practice revolves around a system of becoming, an ever-shifting process of redefinition in which form, self, and structure are in constant negotiation. Her installations, sculptures, and performances highlight temporality through their impermanence, creating a space for vulnerability and critical reflection. She has recently participated in group exhibitions at the 15th Gwangju Biennale, Centre d’Art La Meute, Le Château-Centre d’Art Contemporain et du Patrimoine d’Aubenas, Centre Culturel Suisse (Paris), Belvedere 21, and Kunstraum Niederösterreich, among others.

Ema Ograjenšek is a writer, critic, and curator of contemporary visual art. In 2023 and 2025 she was the guest curator of the U30+ programme for the production of exhibitions by young Slovenian artists at Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana. She is the author of Restricting Flight for Surreptitious Assembly – The Diagrammatic, the Mark and the Vectorial Image (Aksioma, 2024). Her reviews and essays have been published in magazines and on online platforms such as PASSE-AVANT, Artalk, Blok Magazine, Fotograf Magazine, all-over Magazine, ETC. Magazine, Maska Journal, ŠUM Journal, Borec Journal, Tribuna, and Radio Študent. She has curated exhibitions at EXILE (Vienna), New Jörg (Vienna), the Museum of Madness Trate, SCCA-Ljubljana, Aksioma, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (as a member of the Neteorit collective), Center for Contemporary Arts Celje, and Škuc Gallery. She is based in Vienna.