Yona Lee

Propositions (Part 1) (2021)

1 min 18 secSingle channel / Digital Video / Colour / Silent

Propositions responds to the challenge of making site-specific work in a paradoxically hyper-mobile and almost entirely immobilised world with humour and imagination. Travelling between museums and non-descript hotel rooms, trains and buses, swimming pools and street scenes, the apparent utilitarian function of Lee’s structures is troubled by their disregard for the human occupation of space.

At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a steel pipe grows in front of Monet’s Water Lilies (1914-26), working itself into a bind before sprouting a lantern from its top. Outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Lee’s snaking yellow and grey tubes blend almost seamlessly into the building’s iconic facade. Conditions of intimacy and distance connect, collide and are negotiated throughout Propositions, inviting a close relationship with multiple perspectives, geographies and temporalities.

Text courtesy of the Govett Brewster Art Gallery.

Other works in this series

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