Sharon Lee (b.1992, Hong Kong) is an artist with a cross-disciplinary practice based on photography. She works with images, objects, and text in relation to histories, memories, and sites. Her works examine how different forms of dis-appearance (Abbas1997) shape cultural representations, relational dynamics and spatial identity. Lee considers post-photography in a reverse manner parallel to the rise of technology. 

 

Turning the photographic setting into a play of power, Lee adopts a lens-less/camera-less approach to subvert the structure, relation, process and culture in photography. Taking Re- (repetition, return, revert) as a methodology, Lee combines craftsmanship and conceptualism in her photography practice. Lee adopts primitive optics with various reproduction techniques, such as moulding, imprinting, re-photographing etc., in creating analogue-digital hybrids. The material transmutation and tactile sensitivity in her photography works shed light on her early explorations in ceramics. The slowness and detour aim to question the photographic time and image making. 

 

In reproduction and erasure, Lee embraces the act of image making as a form of negotiation with its referent, not necessarily with a single photograph but the history, culture, art, science, and technology that it carries. From pinhole photography to computer-generated imagery, post-photography is regarded as a provocation and rejection in Lee’s practice evolving in an unsettling condition between the eternal and the ephemeral perception.

 

Lee received an MFA and a BA in Fine Arts from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the recipient of a number of grants and awards, including Winner of WMA Masters Award 2018-2019, Peter Curzon Oram Charitable Trust Scholarship 2020-2021 & 2021-2022, HKSAR Government Talent Development Scholarship 2019-2020 & 2020-2021, Hong Kong Art Development Council-Cultural Exchange Arts Development Fund, Reaching Out Award. She has participated in art residencies in Taiwan, Austria, Germany and US. She debuted her solo exhibition “The Presence of Absence” (2017) at Lumenvisum as the recipient of the New Light Award. She had group exhibitions and commissioned art projects with local and international art institutions, such as "emo gym" (2021) at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Peer to Peer: UK/HK, University of Salford Art Collection, Open Eye Gallery, Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, The Listening Biennial, Errant Sound, Norwegian Artistic Research Programme, The Art Academy Bergen, Art Promotion Office, WMA WYNG Foundation, Hong Kong International Photo Festival.