Mai 36 Galerie is pleased to announce the representation of Maia Ruth Lee (*1983, Busan, South Korea).

Maia Ruth Lee’s work explores the shifting landscapes of language, memory and identity within the context of migration and personal mythology. Born in South Korea, raised in Nepal, and having lived in cities as varied as New York and Salida, Colorado, she has developed a visual language that navigates the dislocation and fluidity of cross cultural experience.

Her practice spans photography, video, painting, and sculpture, examining lives shaped by precarity and unrootedness—where maps, atlases, and banners serve as markers of movement and, often, of loss. Through translation as a method, Lee moves her work across mediums, linking themes of borders, community, and language with material embodiments of carriers and acts of self-preservation. Lee’s work creates a passageway, forging new lexicons that give form to transient lives and their stories—moving beyond conventional notions of legibility and comprehension.

Maia Ruth Lee received a BFA from Hong Ik University in Seoul and attended the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver. She is currently pursuing a Masters degree in Migration Studies at University of San Francisco.

photo: Peter Sutherland