Sharon Lee has a cross-disciplinary art practice based on photography. Lee works with images, objects, and text concerning histories, memories, and sites. Her sculptural and relational-driven photographic works examine cultural representations, relational dynamics and spatial identity. Lee explores the poetics of disappearance, the presence of absence, and itinerant belongings.
Lee regards the slowness and detour in her image-making as a counterforce to the mass and speed in the post-photographic condition. In reproduction and erasure, Lee embraces alternative image-making as a form of negotiation, not necessarily with a single photograph but with the history, culture, art, science, and technology it carries. Taking Re- (repetition, return, revert) as a methodology, Lee combines primitive optics with a wide range of reproduction techniques in creating analogue-digital hybrids. The material transmutation and tactile sensitivity in her photography works shed light on her early explorations in ceramics.
Turning the photographic setting into a play of power, Lee intends to subvert the structure, relation, process and culture in photography. In the latest portrait series, If Tomorrow Never Comes (2022), Lee explores listening as a poetic momentum for constructing imagery and reframing time as an agent of disappearance.