Yona Lee is not currently represented in New Zealand, but is represented in Australia by Fine Arts, Sydney.

Yona Lee makes large, immersive, labyrinthine installations. In a Fagor Factory hall, hundreds of metres of stainless-steel tubing are cut and assembled into elaborate linear structures that allow a different rapport with space. By incorporating items extracted from urban and domestic spaces (furniture, decor, seats, beds, etc.), the artist infuses her piece with an everyday surrealism. Producing site-specific works, she arranges systems and networks that can equally seem authoritarian or utopian, utilitarian or playful. A musician who plays the cello, she conceives her artworks as scores, which visitors are invited to interpret by engaging with them.

The artist analyses the spatial and social peculiarities of the host site so that she can respond appropriately. Her intention is not to colonise the space but to emphasise its natural characteristics in order to create an environment that stretches from floor to ceiling and thus becomes an integral part of the architecture. The exhibition space, formerly a manufacturing facility, is thus both the container and the subject of the work, linking factory work and artistic work, and the human flow inherent to the site’s two uses.