In Yona Lee’s work, the quotidian takes on new forms. Chairs, fans, lamps and beds are placed into looping metal structures, forcing a new perspective on an ordinary thing. Stainless steel tubes interlink with one another, seamlessly melding and twisting to create labyrinthine sculptural arrangements with no clear beginning or end. Lee’s site-specific works bring new dimensions to the spaces they exist in.

Lee began to explore the tubular form around 2016, influenced by the differences between South Korea, where she was born, and New Zealand, where she moved at the age of 11. “It really started from spending time in Seoul and thinking about sound travelling through space—there was a moment when this concept developed into a body traveling through space,” Lee says. “A really dominant difference between living in Auckland and Seoul was the density of space. Thinking about different transportation systems, like trains or cars and planes, and how that changes our understanding of time and space, and how technology really collapses and flattens the experience.”

Lee noticed the tubular structures everywhere in Seoul, from subway trains to bus handles; and in the private, domestic sphere, in towel racks and beds. “I was really intrigued by its universal quality and its ability to be anywhere,” she says. She was also struck by the physical boundlessness of the material: “It’s such a strong material, but if you apply heat it’s also very malleable, and that really allowed a lot of different languages. The smaller it gets, it becomes an object, but if you go thicker, it gives the possibility of going to a building scale, an architectural scale. There’s a huge range of possibilities.”

Growing up learning to play classical cello also informs the way Lee makes this work: the metal is like a score, and her interpretations each time she uses it are akin to a musician playing pre-written melodies with feeling. “I was making work in an iterative way, and what I think that’s got to do with the idea of performance is that you perform the same piece of music so many times, but there’s something about the beauty and small iterations you make,” she says. “That attitude or practice definitely influences the way I think about projects.

“You follow the instructions, but somehow you are able to bring your own interpretation of the pieces. I find the coexistence of composer and performer really beautiful and bring that same approach: the work can coexist with the space, rather than treating the space as neutral.”

Some of Lee’s works have an implicit invitation within them: a chair, for instance, invites the viewer to take a seat. Lee never includes instructions on how the audience should interact, and has been fascinated to see how viewers engage with the work depending on its situational context.

“Over time, I recognised the possibilities it’s got in terms of interactivity from the audience, and I realised that it wasn’t the same as so-called interactive art,” she says. “There’s something quite distinguishing in this idea of functionality.

“I get all these notes from institutions: kids like sleeping in the bed, and a lot of people are socialising and resting within the space. In commercial galleries, people are more cautious.”

For Melbourne Art Fair 2025, Lee has made a new work which responds to the kinetic motion sculptures of the New Zealand artist Len Lye. “There’s something quite interesting about his use of movement in his work—it’s a bit like a piece of music,” she says. “It’s very clear where there’s an introduction and how it unfolds over a period of time. There’s a clear sense of where the climax is.”

This sculptural work spans 15 metres, drawing on the tubes and activating a sequence of subtle movements in the kinds of objects one might find in a ‘smart’ home, such as a robot vacuum, fans and a warmer rack. “I have all these objects in my previous work that are functional. There’s something in that which I thought might be quite interesting to develop in response to Len Lye, and that was to do with curating, or in a way, composing movement of these objects,” she says. “That thinking really led me to look at these smart devices where you can simply control these movements on a hub or your phone, and that made me think a little bit more about technology.”

Through this work, Lee illustrates the bind of modern living: in accepting the terms of existence today in all its infinite possibility, we give up a part of ourselves. “There’s something about all these dualities, the contradicting quality in this idea of technology,” she says. “There are all these devices to make our life convenient. But there’s always the dark side—what are we sacrificing?”

Yona Lee
Melbourne Art Fair
Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre
(Melbourne/Naarm VIC)
20—23 February

Yona Lee
Fine Arts, Sydney
(Sydney/Eora NSW)
February—March

This article was originally published in the January February 2024 print edition of Art Guide Australia.