Sumin Lee
On her work and research, Sumin Lee (1990, South Korea) uses herself as an anonymous Asian woman and an object through the camera. With sadistic and destructive actions, her practice redefines the consciousness of ‘refinement,’ the notion of human’s fantasy in our daily life. She sees these as cultural phenomena and uses them with her sarcasm and silliness. Sumin is engaged in the artist collective Comfort Ball with her enthusiasm on food, exploring food as a reflective method and using cooking as a performative tool that interprets the ground where she belongs. She is expected to graduate VAV (Video Audio Visual) at Gerrit Rietveld Academie 2020.
Comfort Ball is a gastronomy oriented art collective organised by visual artist, performer Bin Koh (KR) and Sumin Lee (KR). They distort and twist a traditional way of cooking with Asian ingredients to formulate an alien scenery. This scenery speaks itself to show how they are displayed in western society as an Asian woman, finding parallels between being low waged hospitality workers and Asian women in western society that both are fetishised and alienated at the same time. They address this observation and experience through cooking and stress the gazes of fetishisation and ignorance under the name of ‘exoticism’ within their body politics. Their act not only manifests Asian women but also the queer and trans among us, the differently-abled bodies. Comfort Ball has organised multiple events, performance at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Paradiso Amsterdam, Framer Framed, NDSM nursery square, and Het Nieuwe Instituut.
