Image courtesy the artist and Tina Kim Gallery. Photo: Sang Yong Lee.
Maia Ruth Lee: Double Vision
September 10 – October 24, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 10, 2026, 6-8pm
525 West 21st Street, NYC
Tina Kim Gallery is pleased to present Double Vision, Maia Ruth Lee’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together a new body of paintings from the artist’s Bondage Baggage series, Lee debuts new sculptural and video works interrogating migration as simultaneous perception, conditioning identity within multiple histories, temporalities, and systems of knowledge.
Lee’s exhibition takes its title from Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture. The migrant’s double vision simultaneously inhabits both the place left behind and the place occupied as the condition for a complete understanding of the migrant’s life. Double vision becomes both a metaphor and a new way of working memory as material. Across both gallery spaces, Lee’s work expands and contracts image and sculpture, memory and record. Forms stack, unfold, mirror, and reassemble, building identity as a continuous accumulation, complicating the narrative of migration as one fixed point of origin.
Anchoring the exhibition is a series of new paintings from Lee’s Bondage Baggage methodology. The suitcase is a generative metaphor where luggage becomes more than functional objects of transport. They are vessels where memory, absence, expectation, and aspiration collide. New sculptures preserve the impressions of bound bundles after their contents have been released, while video and photographic works draw on Lee’s family archive, including footage recorded by her parents in Nepal and Korea. Her sculptural assemblages also revisit architectural fragments salvaged from New York City, reflecting the artist’s longstanding engagement with the city as both home and material.
Together, these works present history and memory as layered and ever-evolving, where the past and present fold into one another and identity is continually transported, translated, and reshaped.
The gallery looks forward to celebrating this compelling exhibition with you at their opening evening reception on Thursday, September 10!
To learn more, click here.