Vancouver-based sculptural artist and ceramicist Josephine Lee showcases her latest piece /born ignorant in an abyss of light at the Burrard Arts Foundation (BAF). Located in the garage on the left side of BAF’s entrance, you’ll peep through a glass tile window to view the scintillating piece. Three medium-sized porcelain vessels are laid out on separate cubic blocks forming a triangle and attached to a transparent curvy glass tube.  The tube contains a current of electricity that sparks in accordance with a grainy, archival video loop of a house repeatedly blowing up, then becoming whole again.

After speaking with Lee, it became apparent that this piece represented more than an unconventional mélange of mediums. Through the triad of politics, science, and aesthetics, Lee evolves her art practice while simultaneously exploring a sense of home and belonging. 

Lee’s journey to becoming an artist has been greatly influenced by the constant migration she endured since an early age. Displaced from her home country of South Korea as a baby, she has since been navigating different realms of “home,” moving back and forth between Canada, the USA, and South Korea. Lee makes a point to recognize the effects of politics that ultimately prohibited her from establishing a sense of belonging in these transient spaces. The North American cultural atmosphere that she found her body in as an immigrant—especially living in Los Angeles in the 90s—was very much racially charged, leading to experiences of racial profiling and living in low-income housing.

This experience did not change as she studied across Canada from Quebec to Saskatchewan, continuing to experience language and racial barriers that had her dwelling on how the concept of claiming a space as a home is even determined. “It’s been a bit of a long journey to say the least. I was deeply affected by having immigrated at an early age to North America from South Korea, where I was born. It has been this constant traversing of borders, culture, and language in all points of my life, and that deep and lasting impact in how I sort of think about my work and try to understand this idea of belonging or home where a place actually is, and I think that is a deep core in my practice,” says Lee.

The allure of Lee’s work lies in her unconventional albeit refreshing medium of sculptures and ceramics, providing a break from Vancouver’s traditional forms of photography and painting. The three aforementioned porcelain vessels and the accompanying borosilicate glassware tubes were handblown by Lee, who claims she was inspired to create them while randomly perusing a book on American glassmaking. Though ironically in its execution, there are stylistic hints of Lee’s Korean heritage.

After watching /born ignorant in an abyss of light for a length of time, I became fascinated with how the video and ceramics interacted with one another. The explosion of the historical McDonald Ranch House in the video seemed to be timed precisely with the room darkening and when the ceramics’ electric light halted completely. 

It was apparent that Lee premeditated the meticulous incorporation of physics paired with synchronization: “The plasma itself reacts with your body to ground itself if you touch it because it’s an open circuit, and the ceramics itself are fired, so it was still pretty wet when it was installed. Therefore, with the constant, continual slow drying process that it is experiencing right now, it naturally affects how the plasma reacts in that space. So the temperature will affect it, the moisture will affect it, your presence will affect it. The video is an interminable loop of being and then re-being. The idea that it’s not so much a re-constitution as an attempt on my part to propose a new future, one in which in that moment it doesn’t happen, and then of course, it does inevitably happen. I wanted to play with that just in a way to not make it an archival moment in time, but to remake it into a new proposition for a possibility that doesn’t exist and that I hope in some realm it does.”

I deduced additional iconographic connections from Lee’s piece, particularly around this notion of “trinity”. Even though the video loop was portraying the “Trinity” nuclear device that was native to New Mexico, I could not help but make the inevitable association of “nuclear” with North Korea, given its complex and precarious political history. It would seem as if Lee’s Korean ancestry originated in North Korea, and the earliest notion of “home” was continuing to seep through into the work.

“I’m glad you brought that up because that was definitely one of the considerations I was making; that it’s not just about this [ranch] house, it’s about how this house formulates those ideologies and fears when it comes to nuclear containment, or containing anything really—fear, toxicity, dispossession, or this idea of home. How do you contain something that is so precarious, to begin with? And so that was something that I really wanted to bring forward, that it didn’t just stop at this historical moment. The moment is just a starting point to something that is larger than that: my own heritage, my own dispossession, my own understanding or misunderstanding of belonging,” Lee explains.

Additionally, the triangular display of the ceramics inadvertently reflected the formation of the Holy Trinity—three separate, unified entities defined as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in Christian doctrine. Iconographic interpretations of the holy trinity were quite prevalent in early Renaissance paintings, and /born ignorant in an abyss of light seems to encompass a more contemporary presentation of this concept. 

Lee’s nuanced triad display served to reflect her sense of belonging. I asked her what she desired people to leave thinking or feeling after viewing her work: “I like that when I make work, more and more it becomes this puzzling together by the very fragmented and complex nature of all our experiences and ideologies, that people come in and piece together in their own way. It doesn’t come together in the same way that we thought it did, and so my hope is that viewers would consider these schematics in a way that makes sense to them.”

/born ignorant in an abyss of light is on display at BAF until March 20th, 2021. Given the nature of the piece, it makes for better viewing after dark.