MIKE LEE

Pendulum

Opening: October 8th, 6-8 PM

October 8th - November 1st, 2025

Assimilation is not a monolith. Just as notions of the American Dream shapeshift so, too, does the vision of that fantasy. In Mike Lee’s case, he has witnessed a refocusing on family and shared values. This embrace of a more traditional mindset echoes his parents’ generation, even if theirs was an immigrant Korean-American experience. Sometimes we need this outside perspective to show us who we are as a people. Perhaps the most famous roadtrip photography book, “The Americans,” by Robert Frank was a cross-country visual diary from a Swiss documentarian. There’s a critical distance from the normative, which in turn helps us locate a new center. Mike Lee grew up largely with an absent father who personified a form of workaholism as means of financial survival. His mother, conversely, was a pillar of stability and domestication in the home. His current show reflects this duality, where his dad is symbolized as an American made car, almost how John Currin often  employed candelabras as stand-in for the male figure in his early work.


“Yet, paradoxically,” notes Mike Lee, “rising economic and inflationary pressures are turning this aspiration into something increasingly out of reach, leaving this dream as a relic of the past.” This exhibition exists then both as a love letter to his mom and dad while suggesting a mirage of what his own future may hold. Or in the words of William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.”