About Jay Lee

Photo: L'AiR Arts (left), London Design Week (right)

Artist Statement

My practice observes how materials hold and carry memory across different speeds of time and distinct environments—whether familiar or foreign. I view materials as vessels: holding air bubbles, textures of places, and colors from origins. Whether I’m mixing paints from natural pigments and red algae binders, melting glass, cooking starch-based bioplastics, or capturing surrounding elements through the chemistry of alternative photography, I am engaged in a constant dance between what is frozen, what is melting, and what is decaying. 

I assemble these materials to visualize different passages of time. My bioplastic sculptures embody decaying and durational time. Cooked from local grains and starches, these forms carry personal and geographical stories in their very chemistry. They are accessible yet ephemeral—designed to warp and shift, resembling the malleable human memory. 

My experimental photography—with made or found elements—captures flashy, light-speed, momentary time: a split second imprinted by light. 

Glass holds both (re-)cyclical and frozen time. Like glacier ice or bioplastic, it traps air bubbles—archives of breath at the moment of making—within a solid form. Yet its solidity is fragile. It waits only for human breath and heat to flow again, ready to be formed into a completely different shape in a completely different time. 

My paintings are maps of the earth and sea. I create them from scratch using pigments I’ve extracted or collected during my travels, combined with natural binders like red algae. These colors hold the memory of minerals and flora, while the textures carry the physical trace of their making—imprints from studio floors, or marks made unintentionally as color seeps through layers of canvas or delicate paper. 

I approach my studio practice as a form of cooking. Just as I mix paints with historical binders, I cook my bioplastic sculptures using local ingredients that carry personal and collective histories. In this ritual-like process, I feel the texture of memory forming. I trace the seeping, fading colors of Oaxacan cempasúchil (marigold) with my hands while sensing the history of malachite—the ancient pigment once used to paint the green eyes of Egyptian figures. My work becomes material memory: a testimony to the stories we hold, release, and transform—a frozen record of constant flux.