Maggie Lee

Biography

Maggie Lee’s work has taken shape in a wide array of forms including sculpture, installation, photography, zine-making, blogging and moving image. Her videos often oscillate between the personal and the pop-cultural, blending diaristic self-documentation with collaged found sound and image. Lee’s work probes the emotional undercurrents and personal resonances of contemporary culture: memories of the artist’s early years in suburban New Jersey, candid scenes from New York City nightlife, and totem-like odes to the assorted mass-produced ephemera that adorns daily life.

Lee garnered significant acclaim for her 2015 feature-length video Mommy, assembled in the process of the artist clearing out the contents of her childhood home in Westfield, New Jersey. Using a wide array of materials—film slides, home movies, voicemail messages, pixelated cell phone videos, and motion graphics that harken back to Web 1.0 aesthetics—the work provides a piercing glimpse into both the story of the artist’s mother’s emigration to the United States from Taiwan and Lee’s own coming-of-age. Earlier works such as her Video Salad series (2010-2011) or Fall NYC (2014) often take a similar approach, freely mixing quotidian moments, documentation from concerts and parties, appropriated imagery, and music with DJ-like dexterity. 

Maggie Lee was born in 1987. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Jenny’s, New York; Édouard Montassut, Paris; Lomex, New York; 356 Mission, Los Angeles; Real Fine Arts, New York; and LadyBug House, San Francisco. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at Loong Mah, New York;  Svetlana, New York; Shoot The Lobster, New York; Stadgalerie Bern, Bern Switzerland; White Columns and Art Production Fund, New York; Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), New York; Musee d’Art Moderne de Paris, France; Kai Matsumiya, New York; Kunstalle Zürich, Switzerland; T293, Rome, Italy; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Schloss, Oslo, Norway; Triple Canopy, New York; New Museum, New York; and Greene Naftali, New York. She lives and works in New York.