Maia Ruth Lee Invites Us to Embody the Interval
The works draw on motifs of migration, but the motifs themselves migrate across the gallery.
Translation never arrives in Maia Ruth Lee’s solo exhibition at Tina Kim Gallery, Double Vision. Instead, it is a condition to be embodied and probed. Much like her parents — Bible translators who moved to Nepal and developed a written alphabet for the oral Sherpa language — Lee unfolds the act of translation in her new show.
Grid-like patterning inspired by the luggage at Kathmandu airport, illegible glyphs, and images from the family archive act as a recurring visual language across canvas, latex, and steel. The works draw on motifs of migration, but the motifs themselves migrate across the gallery, mutating as they take on new forms. Stacking, for instance, evokes playfulness in the modular canvases of the B.B. Tetris series (all 2026) and heaviness in “Expandable Luggage” (2026), where the growing height perhaps suggests a belabored migration. Here, translation acts as a migration of a kind: some things carry across while others are left behind.
