Gallery 456 is pleased to announce a show of recent work by Hayoon Jay Lee. Her art, known for its intense thematic focus and range of diverse media, has taken the form of paintings, sculptures, installations, and videos, as well as interactive and improvised performances.

The exhibition will include several relief sculptures, made with individual grains of rice, from her Dream Land series. She will also debut seven paintings and one installation from her One Breath series. The gallery will project video footage of Lee’s recent street performances in all five boroughs of New York City and her collaboration with internationally acclaimed poet, Cheryl Moskowitz. At the opening reception, the artist will conduct an original performance.

For more than ten years, Lee has researched and explored how food (and rice in particular) impacts people’s lives -- personally, socially, and politically. Through her work, Lee illuminates the fundamental importance and variability of rice--as food, medicine, and artistic material. Eternal Mother will highlight the diverse roles that rice may assume: rice as subject, rice as medium, rice as prop, and at the end of the evening of the reception, rice as a token of appreciation. This final act of rice-giving represents a quintessential act of hospitality, kindness, and, one could say, motherhood.

Lee designs a shifting landscape of consciousness, slipping between dream and reality, and evoking an unspoken concern. A dawning awareness pervades mind and body; it exists on the level of social dynamics and assimilates aspects of the natural world as well as the global economy. Rice grains give way to hundreds of tiny pieces of rice paper; a single filament of this paper expands, little by little, and with the passage of time, transforms itself back into the macrocosm from which it came.