Yona Lee (b.1986) has presented site-specific installations using steel— a material commonly found in urban environments worldwide—along with everyday objects. Her work embraces the architectural structure and logic of a given space, while simultaneously subverting its conventional norms and assumptions, ultimately dissolving the vertical hierarchies and boundaries inherent to that space.

Yona Lee’s work originates from her early experiences as an aspiring cellist. After an injury to her wrist led her to shift paths and enroll in art school, she began studying fine art, eventually translating her deep fascination with sound into a visual language of “lines.”
 
One day, while observing the metal spike at the base of her cello—used to anchor the instrument during performance—she wondered, “What if this spike were to continue extending into space?” This question became the starting point for her installations using steel rods.

From that point on, Yona Lee deepened her engagement with steel as a material, even learning fabrication techniques firsthand at factories to further develop her practice. Once captivated by the overwhelming yet free-flowing linear sound of string instruments, Lee began to cultivate a new visual language within the strength and softness of steel as a medium.

Alongside her material experimentation, Yona Lee also explored the relationship between her work and the spaces in which it is installed. Her sensitivity to the unique characteristics of each exhibition site can be traced back to her background in music. Just as a performer responds to the scale and atmosphere of a venue when playing music, Lee sees the specific qualities of a space as guiding the direction of her work.

For instance, her steel installation Line Works (2012), inspired by Minimalism and Constructivism, emphasized the abstract sculptural qualities of lines. At the same time, it functioned as a site-specific intervention, probing the spatial relationship and the viewer’s shifting physical perception within the given architectural context.

In Tangential Structures (2013), Yona Lee presented another direction and variation in her practice by overlapping flexible steel rods with everyday objects to create a chaotic landscape that enabled a heightened sensory experience of space.

In her artist statement, Lee describes these installations as “sometimes abstract yet narrative,” adding that “the lines stretched throughout the space are free, sensual, and improvisational, but come into harmony with the industrial and mechanical qualities of the steel.”

In 2016, Yona Lee spent three months as an exchange artist at the SeMA Nanji Residency, during which she began to incorporate Korean contextual elements into her existing installation practice. Focusing on the virtual realm of the internet and the rapid mobility within Seoul’s subway system, Lee collected mass-produced everyday objects commonly found in Korean society—such as outdoor plastic tables, convenience store tents, and parasols—and collaged them to merge different times and spaces, aiming to create a hybrid, unfamiliar site.

The result was presented on a larger and more evolved scale in her solo exhibition 《Yona Lee: In Transit》 at Alternative Space LOOP later that year. In Transit (2016) was built upon meticulous research and measurement of the gallery’s unique architectural features, forming a sculptural flow that responded closely to the space. Each floor’s installation was organically connected to the others, guiding the viewer through a unified, continuous spatial experience.

The work simultaneously responds to the exhibition space and activates a sense of unfamiliarity by allowing disparate everyday objects to occupy specific corners of the gallery, proposing a new, sensory dimension of space. Among these objects, handrails and safety bars commonly found in public transportation serve as symbolic elements of temporary passageways that facilitate transitions from one space to another, transforming the exhibition venue into a liminal site.

With its finely woven interplay of fantasy and reality, as well as overlapping temporalities and spatialities, In Transit generates a sense of disorientation regarding time and place. In doing so, it constructs interstitial zones that resist assimilation into existing spatial or social orders.

In this regard, Yona Lee’s work values harmony and communication with space, but goes a step further by treating the specific site itself as an essential element of the artwork. For this reason, her practice begins with a thorough investigation and understanding of the locations where the work will be situated.

Lee spends as much time as possible on site, observing the movement of visitors and the spatial dynamics. She then utilizes programs such as SketchUp or Blender to translate the space into digital data, allowing her to concretize the structure and layout of the work within the digital environment before its physical realization.

In her 2017 solo exhibition 《MONOCHROME ON DISPLAY》 at the OCI Museum of Art, Yona Lee took the museum itself as the subject of her work, while also presenting pieces that reflected her perspective on the commercialization and standardization surrounding the contemporary art scene.

For the exhibition, Lee covered the walls of the white cube space with large-scale MDF slatwalls, commonly found in accessory shops and retail environments. On these walls, sculptural objects were displayed in rows as if they were commercial products. Although the arrangement resembled a store display, from a distance the overall composition blended with the white walls of the gallery, evoking the appearance of a geometric and minimalist monochrome painting.

These massive sculptural display structures that covered the museum walls metaphorically revealed the commercialization and standardization operating behind the scenes of artistic production and exhibition today.

Meanwhile, Yona Lee’s installation En Route Home (2020), exhibited at the 2020 Busan Biennale, responded to the site-specific context of an abandoned warehouse located in Yeongdo, Busan—a former hub of industrial modernization during Korea’s modern era. Yeongdo is not only tied to the legacy of Korea’s industrial history, but also known as an island of migration and labor, deeply marked by the experiences of refugees during the Korean War.
 
Drawing inspiration from the warehouse’s ceiling structure, Lee constructed a maze-like installation using interconnected stainless steel pipes. Within this structure, she scattered everyday household objects such as beds, beer cans, toilet paper, canned food, and toothbrushes. These traces of domestic life occupying a former industrial space brought visibility to the intertwined histories of life and labor embedded in Yeongdo’s identity.

Fountain In Transit (2023), installed in the inner garden of a hanok adjacent to the Art Sonje Center, features a complex, maze-like structure composed of bent, cut, and welded stainless steel piping.

Within the structure, Lee juxtaposes objects commonly found in urban settings and domestic spaces without narrative coherence. Items associated with disparate places are arranged on equal footing, blurring the distinctions between public and private realms, indoors and outdoors.

The shower tray and faucet installed within the work temporarily reactivated a long-defunct fountain that had existed for years in the inner garden. While traditional sculpture has often occupied the white cube as “art for art’s sake,” devoid of practical function, Yona Lee actively engages with the absence of function—or even highlights its dysfunction—by interweaving the realms of art, design, and architecture.

In her 2024 solo exhibition 《An Arrangement for a Room》 at Art Sonje Center, Yona Lee both physically and conceptually blurred the boundaries between interior and exterior, private and public space, while weaving together the multiple layers of time and velocity embedded in the city of Seoul.

Lee’s work An Arrangement for a Room (2024), which shares its title with the exhibition, begins in a hanok situated outside the museum, extends through the building's interior staircases, and leads to the rooftop overlooking the cityscape of Seoul.

Along this passage—from inside to outside, across varying levels—Lee placed objects typically considered private and utilitarian, such as bedroom furniture, bathroom fixtures, kitchenware, and cleaning supplies. Their presence disrupted conventional expectations of the exhibition space, challenging the boundaries of what belongs in a museum.

She uses the stainless steel pipes as a medium to link together the urban movements and speeds that she has perceived, layering them with her own personal experiences: Seoul’s crowded subway lines, the tight intervals between stations, the bustling transfer stations, the crowds of people and lines of buses waiting for traffic lights, and landscapes flashing by quickly outside the window.

By combining her pipes with the kinds of items found in transit experiences—bus stop request bells, hanging straps, traffic lights, benches, and more—she takes the differing layers of time in the traditional hanok and contemporary art museum setting where her work is displayed and causes them to operate as a single time in the present moment.

In this way, Yona Lee has continuously explored the intersection of multiple layers of time and space by combining fluid, linear materials such as stainless steel piping with everyday objects closely tied to our daily lives. Her temporary structures breathe with the context of specific locations, while simultaneously introducing dissonant objects that disrupt the conventions associated with those spaces—thus enabling new and unfamiliar spatial experiences.

“I realize whether the collaboration with the space is successful during the installation process. At some point, I can feel the space responding. It even reveals aspects I hadn’t noticed before. When the space finally begins to lead the work, that’s when my job is done.” (Yona Lee, Maison Korea interview, August 20, 2024)

Yona Lee earned her BFA and MFA at the University of Auckland Elam School of Fine Arts. Her solo exhibitions include 《Wall, Floor, Ceiling》 (Fine Arts Sydney, Sydney, 2025), 《An Arrangement for a Room》 (Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2024), 《An Arrangement for 5 Rooms》 (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland, 2022), 《Kit-set In-transit》 (Fine Arts Sydney, Sydney, 2021), 《In Transit》 (City Gallery Wellington, Wellington, 2018–2019), and more.

In addition, Lee has participated in numerous group exhibitions both in Korea and abroad, including Buxton Contemporary (Melbourne, 2024), Art Sonje Center (Seoul, 2023), Dunedin Public Art Gallery (Dunedin, 2022), Busan Biennale (Busan, 2020), Lyon Biennale (Lyon, 2019), Sungkok Art Museum (Seoul, 2016), and the Changwon Sculpture Biennale (Changwon, 2016).

She has also been selected for several residency programs, including the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands (2021–2022), the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand (2020), SeMA Nanji Residency (2016), and the Seoul Art Space Geumcheon (2016).

References

• Korea Tomorrow, 철재를 이용하여 공간의 특성을 반영한 설치작업을 선보이는 작가, 이요나, 2016.09.02 
• 대안공간 루프, 이요나 개인전: 인 트랜짓 (Alternative Space LOOP, Yona Lee Solo Exhibition: In Transit) 
• 비애티튜드, 자기 생명력을 지닌 작업 
• OCI 미술관, MONOCHROME ON DISPLAY 
• 아트선재센터, 오프사이트 (Art Sonje Center, off-site)
• 아트선재센터, 이요나: 공간 배치 서울 (Art Sonje Center, Yona Lee: An Arrangement for a Room)
• 메종코리아, 요나의 도시, 2024.08.20