Lee Mei-Ling, Summer

Introduction

Summer Mei-Ling Lee was born and raised in San Fancisco. A multi-disciplinary artist, she creates process-based works and performances, embracing risk-taking and collaboration. Through research and discovery, she sets the conditions for art to enter. Lee explores themes of absence and presence, the impermanence of cultural heritage and humanity’s relationship with “the unknowable”, as seen through her paintings depicting the expanse of the ocean horizon. Her diptych works on paper and mounted on wooden structures form a mirror image of the horizon, recalling the idea of “heaven and earth” in Chinese creation myths. 

Lee’s work often includes projected visuals, with images shifting between layers of translucent sheets of paper; she utilizes light to create different levels of visualization. In the current exhibition with Alisan Fine Arts, her recent cyanotypes have a similar effect. Lee prints family photos onto layers of gauze so that the viewer sees various perspectives as they move around the work, the way memory and human history shift depending on time and place. 

Evoking divinity more directly, her Annunciation series recalls Renaissance altarpieces, painted and gilded in gold leaf and depicting images of Lee’s son and grandmother alongside birds, another recurring motif in the artist’s work. According to the artist, “The gold leaf forms an enigmatic and luminous ground, a mysterious place for ancestors, descendants, and birds closest (to me) to emerge or withdraw…”. Seen through the lens of her family history, Lee’s work offers a nuanced and personal perspective on cultural heritage - evolving and shifting rather than fixed in time. 

Recent exhibitions include Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco); Marqueyssac, France; Untitled Art Fair “Monuments,” Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, SCOPE Miami Beach (Art Basel), Berliner Liste, Italian Institute of Culture, San Francisco Arts Commission, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), Woman-Made Gallery (Chicago, IL) and Fei Contemporary Art Center (Shanghai). Her work is in the permanent collection of He Xiangning Museum in Shenzhen, China.

Light, Space and Time at Alisan Fine Arts-New York in 2024 is the gallery’s first time working with the artist.