Yona Lee

Yona Lee, Fountain in Transit, 2023

Stainless steel and fixtures and fittings. Courtesy Fine Arts, Sydney.

All over the world, wherever we go, generic stainless-steel handrails and barriers are there to aid us, impede us, and control us. They’re so ubiquitous, they’re invisible. We don’t give them a second thought. But Yona Lee insistently draws our attention to them. Her installations and sculptures combine mazes of stainless-steel tubing with random flurries of everyday fixtures and fittings—mop heads and mailboxes, bus seats and beds, phone chargers and umbrellas—as if mocking their utility. Fountain in Transit combines bathroom fixtures—including a shower head, shower curtain, and drain—with a street lamp, a bench, bus handles, and a clock, prompting us to imagine a scenario in which these might come together.

Yona Lee (b.1986) lives in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland. She completed her MFA there, at Elam School of Fine Arts, in 2010. She works in installation, using stainless-steel tubing to create elaborate, site-responsive circuitries that invite us to interact with everyday items incorporated into the structures. She began making these works following a residency in Seoul, where she began thinking about public transport infrastructure and the patterns of behaviour and mass mobility it informs. She has had solo exhibitions at Te Uru, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, in 2017; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, in 2018; City Gallery, Wellington, in 2018; and Auckland Art Gallery in 2022. Her work also featured in the 2016 Changwon Sculpture Biennale, 2019 Lyon Biennale, and 2020 Busan Biennale.