Bondage Baggage is the first major monograph on the work of artist Maia Ruth Lee and focuses on her ongoing body of work of the same name.
Working across painting, sculpture, photography, and film, Lee has crafted a visual lexicon that takes on the complexities of the self in times of dissonance and globalization. Lee was born in Busan, South Korea, grew up in Kathmandu and Seoul, spent over a decade in New York City, and has lived in recent years in Salida, Colorado. Migration lies at the core of her experience and comes to form in works that often evoke maps, atlases, and banners with an underlying interest in language, translation, symbols, and signs.
In Bondage Baggage, the body is also referenced, as the bound baggage and textile works metaphorically visualize the accumulations and contours of a life. The book weaves images of the sculpture, paintings, prints, and installation works that comprise this series with correspondence between Lee and her community of friends and family around the world, letters that tackle the realities of motherhood, community, language/communication, independence and interdependence, and artmaking in this fraught geopolitical moment.
Lee''s work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
