Unfolding Connections, 2025

The New Media Artspace presented Joyce Yu-Jean Lee: Unfolding Connections, a solo exhibition of new and old works from March 10 through May 1, 2025 at the New Media Artspace gallery in the Newman Library of Baruch College, CUNY, 151 E. 25th Street, Manhattan, New York City. The exhibition was curated by Dennis Delgado, Assistant Professor in the Fine and Performing Arts Department in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences and was produced by the New Media Artspace Student Docent Team. The entire exhibition is archived online: Click here to view it.

Excerpts of curatorial statement by Dennis Delgado:

“The first unfolding comes from the artist’s desire to excavate her family’s history. In Unfolding Nai Nai (fourth floor) the artist reaches out to her aunts, uncles and father to learn more about her paternal grandmother. An émigré who was displaced by the Communist Revolution in 1949, Nai Nai took her four children and flew first to Shanghai, then eventually out of China. The work’s own opacity mirrors the challenge in reconstructing the life and personality of a family member through the lens of those surrounding her. By the time Nai Nai is interviewed a sense of her indominable personality and penchant for artistic creation is already established. She shares her experience of rearing children and demonstrates her focus and skill at transforming discarded paper into functional objects and crafty representations. Through these scenes we recognize an immediate connection to her own granddaughter’s creative output. Unfolding Connections tracks a contemporary artist’s search for knowledge, identity, and understanding as she unravels the web of mediations that obscure and contain her families’ roots in China.

The piece What It’s Like, What It Is on the top (fifth) floor brings us back to the recent history of the 2020 pandemic. The global health crisis unleashed a local thinly-veiled xenophobic hostility toward Asian-Americans as misinformation on the COVID-19 virus’ origin began to spread throughout the internet. Asian-Americans found themselves a target in their own communities. The simplicity of the work shows the mobility and power words have to shape, reassert or attack notions of what it means to be Asian and American in New York City. The animated quality of the words flashing on and off on each screen (in rapid intervals) reflects the speed at which these notions and words circulate in the public domain. From piecing together her matriarchal roots, to utilizing art to dispel erroneous misconceptions, the artist turns her attention to the Internet.

Unfolding Connections culminates in the artist’s work, FIREWALL Cafe, on floors two and three. FIREWALL looks at China’s primary search engine, Baidu and allows you to compare it simultaneously to our own most widely used search engine, Google. The comparison of image search results reveals how some keyword searches are curated or at least directed toward a specific area. The project remains as relevant today as the year it debuted. Lee’s work displays in real time how politics interfere with our ability to seek truth and understand the greater world we live in. Should state policy govern how we shape our notions through accessible media? Unfolding Connections takes us through that complex process of forming our own identity, and understanding how notions of truth are shaped by media and our socio-political environment.”