Maia Ruth Lee: Double Vision at Tina Kim Gallery

Maia Ruth Lee's Double Vision, her second solo exhibition at Tina Kim Gallery, runs in Chelsea through October 24, 2026. It occupies both of the gallery's spaces and mixes painting, sculpture, textile, video and salvaged material.

Lee was born in Busan in 1983 and lives and works in San Francisco. She earned a BFA at Hongik University, studied at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, and is now enrolled in a master's program in migration studies at the University of San Francisco. She took part in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, François Ghebaly in Los Angeles and Primary in Nottingham. Her work belongs to the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Syracuse University Art Museum.

The title comes from Homi K. Bhabha's The Location of Culture, where the migrant's "double vision" means living in the place left behind and the place now occupied at once. Lee treats this as a working method as well as a metaphor, with memory serving as material. Forms stack, unfold, mirror and reassemble, so that identity reads as continuous accumulation rather than a story with one fixed origin.

The core of the show is a group of new paintings from her Bondage Baggage methodology, in which the suitcase becomes a vessel where memory, absence, expectation and aspiration collide. Works include B.B. Constellation (2026, acrylic ink and enamel on canvas, roughly 277 by 467 cm), B.B. Stem-Stack and the B.B.Tetris series.

The sculptures follow the same logic of doubling. New latex works hold the shape and surface imprint of a bound bundle after its contents have been removed. An oversized form based on the Korean 이민가방, the immigrant's bag, carries video stills of Lee's family sewn onto it. A newly commissioned video installation draws on home footage her parents recorded in Nepal and Korea.

Lee also returns to the steel glyphs she first made in 2019, assembled from architectural fragments salvaged around New York. They sit between word and sculpture, a code that feels familiar yet resists reading. Here they appear as Steel Glyph Vision Chart (2026), an installation of fifteen steel pieces, edition 1 of 6.

A text by literary translator Peace Pyunghwa Lee accompanies the show. It frames translation as seeing in two directions at once, with departure and arrival laid over each other, and it echoes the exhibition's view of history as layered, with past and present left deliberately unresolved.