EXHIBITIONS

Sandra Eula Lee: The Walking Mountain

Marité & Joe Robinson Strolling Gallery I
September 29, 2023–February 4, 2024

Sandra Eula Lee is a multidisciplinary artist who alters ordinary and found objects to explore notions of permanence. She is interested in how materials are produced and used with varying lifespans in different cultural contexts. This exhibition showcases selections from The Walking Mountain series, which primarily consists of over 80 drawings created since 2014. The drawing sizes range from 10 x 10 inches to 12 x 14 inches and their materials include ink, watercolor, graphite, colored pencil, sewing, and relief print on different papers and fabric. Lee’s varied compositions feature meticulous mounds of rocks, outlines of rock formations, and geometric shapes with radiating lines. Lee was inspired to create these drawings after encountering piles of stones in the mountains of South Korea, while she was living in Seoul. She explains, “I [saw] this form repeated in daily life–piles of rubble from demolished buildings, piles of brick and concrete waiting to be used for construction, simultaneous states of orientation, deterioration and becoming.” This series, like several other artworks, refers to the walking mountain, which is a concept from a Japanese Buddhist sutra by philosopher Dogen Zenji. He writes “Because mountains and waters have been active since before the Empty Aeon, they are alive at this moment…Mountains’ walking is just like human walking.” The artist elaborates that this “may appear different from a human’s but we know they walk because their heads are in the sky and their feet are in the water.” This expansive collection of drawings is a reflection on the interconnectedness of human experience and geological shifts. By juxtaposing subtle landscape transformations with rapid urban development, Lee reveals the relative nature of the passage of time.

Artist Bio:
Sandra Eula Lee is a Korean-American artist and educator who has taught at Franklin & Marshall College, Kenyon College, and University of the Arts London. Her interdisciplinary artwork has been exhibited internationally in solo exhibitions including a 10-year survey at The Hilliard Museum in Lafayette, LA; Art Space Pool in Seoul, South Korea; The Martin Art Gallery at Muhlenberg College, and CEAC in Xiamen, China. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, Incheon Art Platform in Seoul; Inside-Out Museum in Beijing; DadaPost in Berlin; Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University; Smack Mellon in Brooklyn; Goucher College in Baltimore; and recently at the Delaware Contemporary. Lee is an Andrew Mellon Foundation Fellow and has received awards from the Asian Cultural Council, and the 2020 Individual Artist Award from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Her Artist-in-Residence fellowships include The Elizabeth Foundation Studio Center, The Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Residency Unlimited, Seoul Museum of Art, and the Vermont Studio Center. Lee received her BFA from Cornell University and MFA from Hunter College, and is currently Assistant Professor of Art at Montclair State University.