Found Objects: Artist Maia Ruth Lee’s Downtown Dream World

Up until I was seven, it was utter confusion. Creativity came a little later for me. We moved a lot: Papua New Guinea, Singapore for a year, then Nepal. We were a really tight-knit family. Until then, I’d been homeschooled and only spoke Korean. I remember it being international day at school and you were supposed to come in costume and carry your country flag. I didn’t understand the assignment and no one could find a Korean flag, so I paraded with the Swiss one.

That video specifically is about memories and motherhood. The writing that I edited into the video spans over 10 years, then jumps to all the different stages of pregnancy and then after I had Nima. The video is an old survey video of Nepal that my dad shot in 1988 as our family trekked through the Himalayas and he narrates the mundane details. I appropriate pseudo subtitles to go with the pace of his speech, but it has nothing to do with translation.
Koreans will know instantly that it’s not a direct translation. Otherwise, the viewer will think the speech is being translated into subtitles that are my writing, but in actuality, it is not.

And also the separation between me and my parents, between religion and culture, their lack of understanding, but also my lack of understanding of them. The video talks about my fear of being a mother. Growing up I never wanted to be a mother. The text is from a journal of notes to myself that I wrote long ago to my future child, things that I wish my parents had told me, “tools.”

The glyphs are discarded metal scraps from fences and windows that I gathered all over New York in different boroughs and metal shops. If you think about it, they are parts of structures, about safety, protection, but about boundaries too. I’d put them together to make these symbols. It was very intuitive, everything made on site. The welders give me 15 minutes to compose them. There are no sketches.

I was a trained painter. Painting in Korea is all about perfection, hyperrealism is considered a good painting. Abstraction wasn’t a thing, contemporary art was not part of the curriculum at all. Handling metal is so refreshing because I have no idea about the context surrounding it or welding, for that matter. Symbols and signs obviously relate back to language and this compendium is almost like a dictionary of tools. The meanings that I assign them come afterward.

It’s like a pamphlet you get handed in Chinatown. There’s a bit of humor, pseudospin. It comes in many forms: astrology, psychoanalysis, offering an aspect of self-preservation. There are nine out of ninety-eight tools that I put on the key.

“Bondage Baggage” is the title for that series. I had been documenting luggage over the course of six years at the Kathmandu airport every time I went back to Nepal. Most of Nepal’s economy is driven by migrant labor, a lot of young men work in the Middle East, for example. When they return to Nepal they use these bags (I’m not just specifically talking about Nepal, but a lot of developing countries pack their luggage similarly). The reason is security, to protect their stuff. The airport is infamous for taking things out of luggage. I’m sure this goes for a lot of developing countries. I had hundreds and hundreds of images of this luggage. Documentation is one thing, but I felt like the physicality of it is what is very impressive to me. I got the same materials, the rope, the tarp, the boxes, string, and fabrics to recreate some of this baggage. It’s about family, migration, labor, diaspora, about boundaries, but also self-preservation.

I’m always surprised and very humbled by it. Peter has always been a part of this downtown. I was like that back in Nepal. Peter and I are similar in that way. What’s most shocking of all is that Nima is as well. People wanted a child, this sense of joy or humor, whatever it is. There were people I didn’t know at the party who know Nima.

I think I’ve always been interested in education first, not about didactic works, but about learning. Art for me is about learning, there is a takeaway, some kind of launching pad for a thought process or a segue into learning new concepts, ideas, people, or things. Wide Rainbow is natural and organic to me because that is how I interact with art anyway. Children should always be the main audience for art, to share that with the next generation only makes sense to me. In the video, I put this message to my own future self, I wish I was taught these tools as a child and want to make sure I pass them along to Nima. Art is a tool. As an adult, it’s really about preserving that feeling of being a child.