Kakyoung Lee was born in Waegwan, South Korea in 1975. She earned BFA and MFA degrees in Printmaking at Hong Ik University, Seoul before earning an MFA in studio arts at the State University of New York Purchase. Upon graduating from SUNY in 2003, Lee established her studio and home in Brooklyn, New York and began to exhibit her work widely, including at the Drawing Center, New York; the Museum of Modern Art; Queens Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art; MASS MoCA; Ryan Lee Gallery, Tiger Strike Astroid Gallery, New York; Kunsthalle Bremen and Deutscher Bundestag Berlin, in Germany; Seoul Arts Center, and Space C in Jeju, Korea.
Transitions: Recent Prints and Animations by Kakyoung Lee
Transitions: Recent Prints and Animations by Kakyoung Lee
September 10 – October 26, 2025
Public events on Wednesday, September 17:
4:30–5:30 p.m. Artist's talk by Kakyoung Lee
Lang Performing Arts Center, Cinema
5:30–7:00 p.m.: List Gallery Reception
The List Gallery, Swarthmore College, is pleased to present Transitions: Recent Prints and Animations by Kakyoung Lee. The exhibition will be presented September 10—October 26, 2025. On Wednesday, September 17 at 4:30 PM, Lee will give a public lecture about her artistic journey and creative process in the Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema. The List Gallery reception will follow 5:30–7:00 p.m. Gallery hours are Tuesdays–Sundays, Noon-5:00 p.m. In addition, the List Gallery is pleased to publish and display Practice, a limited-edition artist’s book by Kakyoung Lee. More information about the exhibition and a video about the artist’s creative process will soon be available on the List Gallery website. Funding for these initiatives has been made possible by the Wiliam J. Cooper Foundation.
Kakyoung Lee's prints, drawings, animations, and video projections celebrate undervalued identities, everyday activities, and transitive processes. Drawing upon her own journey as a first-generation Korean immigrant living in the United States, she portrays varied forms of self-realization, empowerment, or transformation. Some works reflect her fascination with ordinary activities, such as walking through the city, swimming, or looking through a train window. Practice, Lee’s most recent artist book, is comprised of more than six hundred images of a girl practicing frisbee. Through combining various labor-intensive processes, Lee celebrates playful and sustained experimentation.
Kakyoung Lee, Passersby 1 [Detail], 2022, one of 46 drypoint prints on BFK Rives cream papercreated in tandem with the eponymous animation (43 seconds with sound).Each print measures: 9 ó x 13 inches.
While many of Lee’s works focus on activities that can foster wellness and resilience, other works portray life-changing experiences, such as the birth of a child, natural disasters, or racist violence. For example, Lee’s Passersby series focuses on the anti-Asian hate crimes that were recorded by surveillance cameras in New York City and widely broadcast by television stations and online channels during the COVID-19 pandemic. Passersby 2 (2022) is based on surveillance footage that showed hotel lobby workers passively watching while a man assaulted an Asian woman. Lee began the piece by creating a sequence of 102 monoprints—using coffee instead of printing ink to evoke the color of dried blood. She then digitally captured images of the monoprints to create the 43-second stop-action video.
Displaying a grid of selected monoprints next to the Passersby video, Lee invites viewers to consider how information can be alternately elaborated, erased, or recontextualized over time. Kakyoung Lee was born in Waegwan, South Korea in 1975. She earned BFA and MFA degrees in Printmaking at Hong Ik University, Seoul before earning an MFA in studio arts at the State University of New York Purchase. Upon graduating from SUNY in 2003, Lee established her studio and home in Brooklyn, New York and began to exhibit her work widely, including at the Drawing Center, New York; the Museum of Modern Art; Queens Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art; MASS MoCA; Ryan Lee Gallery, Tiger Strike Astroid Gallery, New York; Kunsthalle Bremen and Deutscher Bundestag Berlin, in Germany; Seoul Arts Center, and Space C in Jeju, Korea.
Lee has also participated in numerous artist residency programs, including the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, Omi, The International Studio & Curatorial Program, Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Brandywine Workshop. In addition, she has received notable awards, including a purchase award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the AHL Foundation Grant, the Korea Arts Foundation of America Award, and two grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
Lee’s works have been featured in Art on Paper, Hyperallergic, Art in America, the Huffington Post, Printeresting.com, and in diverse magazines internationally. In addition, her prints and animations are included in the collections of the National Gallery of Art and the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the Asia Society Museum, New York; the McNay Art Museum, Texas; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; and the Jeju 4.3 Memorial in Jeju, Korea.
