ABOUT YOONA LEE
BIO
Yoona Lee is a Seattle-based visual artist, writer, and activist. She has shown at Sotheby’s NYC, the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience (a Smithsonian Affiliate), Seattle gallery Vermillion, and other venues. Yoona has presented her art to talk about cultural identity, hybridity, and marginalization in various educational venues, including the University of Washington Robinson Center for Young Scholars, 2015 Seattle Race Conference, and the Breadline Performance Series.
Her art and writing have been featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, and Seattle newspaper The Stranger, among other publications. An outspoken racial justice activist, Yoona has been quoted in publications ranging from the Seattle Times to British Vogue. Her blog can be found here.
Yoona received her bachelor's degree in English, with a minor in Fine Arts, from the University of Pennsylvania.
STATEMENT
As a Korean American cross-disciplinary artist, I produce work informed by my experiences as both a woman of color and a racial justice activist. To explore racial politics in America and abroad, I use different approaches that include portraiture, abstraction, conceptual collage, and multimedia performance.
My figurative and abstract work addresses the traumatizing impact of individual and systemic racism, histories of oppression, and otherness. Through portraiture, I seek to center historically marginalized groups, including Black, Indigenous, and people of color, along with my own ancestors, most notably the four generations of revolutionary, anti-imperialist activists who preceded me.
My current medium is ink made from guns dissolved in acid. As a powerfully symbolic and patently subversive medium, it is the perfect agent to address the impacts of gun violence. I use the ink to address a broad range of hyper-local, national, and international themes, including gun culture, racialized capitalism, and global imperialism.
More than ever, my creative practice and activism have become intertwined. Using art, I hope to help change the cultural conversation and facilitate healing, both of which are critical to radical social transformation and, ultimately, collective liberation.