Sandra Eula Lee

In Conversation with Heather Moqtaderi and Kristen Neville Taylor

Artists Sandra Eula Lee and Kristen Neville Taylor, along with curator Heather Moqtaderi, met to discuss Lee’s exhibition The Walking Mountain at the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery at Drexel University in Philadelphia. The conversation was recorded, transcribed and edited for clarity. The exhibition is on view through May 25, 2024. This interview was conducted in partnership with Past Present, a bi-annual journal of artistic practices, and will appear in Issue 5 in August 2024. 

HM: Sandra, it’s been great working with you on your exhibition The Walking Mountain at the Pearlstein Gallery. Kristen is an artist whose work, I think, resonates really beautifully with yours. So, I thought it would be great to invite her into this conversation. 

SL: Thanks for bringing us together. It’s wonderful to share commonalities, the three of us, through material histories and histories of making. 

HM: Shall we dive in with the pond? You first created Portable Pond after residencies in China and Korea where you saw ponds in traditional East Asian Gardens. Could you tell us about the life of this piece? 

SL: Sure, so much of the context for my work comes from deeply observing changes in daily life. Portable Pond grew from experiences navigating rapid demolition, construction, and change within the neighborhoods where I lived in Seoul and then in Beijing. This created a violent sense of dislocation. Over the years demolition continued while, at the same time, I was researching traditional scholar gardens. What impacted me the most was the central pond or lake that reflects its surroundings. As I was making my work, I was trying to find a meeting ground between these contradictory states– the daily acceleration of change on the one hand, and the historical traditions of garden making for slower contemplation. I wanted to create something from these simultaneous but totally different value systems. The portable ponds are one of the forms that emerged during this period. The first was shown in an exhibition Two waters that traveled from Xiamen, to Seoul, then to Brooklyn. I’ve created the large ponds for different spaces. Meanwhile, Sidewalk Soswaewon is a small reflective pond I created with sidewalk bricks.

KNT: It's amazing how you have these distinct reference points for the work–a garden from a particular place or country or a scholar's garden, for example. How do you select materials? Do you happen upon a stock of something, or does the idea for a material come first? I get the sense from your work that this is always changing, depending on the piece. With the pond, did the need for this material come in to meet the needs of the pond or did the material come to you? 

SL: The process definitely depends on the piece. There’ll be materials I encounter that appear as artworks and I try to reframe them somehow. For others it takes a while to understand how I might combine, remake, or transform them into new states. In the case of the pond, I wanted to make something reflective. This was during a residency in Xiamen, China. There were some market stalls, and one fellow had these really thin sheets of acrylic. I thought, maybe I can do something with this, but wasn't sure how, so I brought them back to the studio. I started moving them around, handling and treating them in different ways until it made sense to collage them into a large floor-based reflective surface.

HM: The acrylic is a material that you've found in the marketplace, but some of your materials in this show washed up in the sea. 

SL: Yes, those materials are also from Xiamen. They appear to be rounded stones, but they were building demolition rubble that was dumped into the ocean. Over time each piece became weathered and rounded, eventually washing up on the shore each day. The beach would be covered with these colorful stones, but when you picked them up you’d see they were actually chunks of brick and concrete, with little parts of tile and such. I started collecting and bringing them to my studio. For this exhibition, I created small cairn sculptures and set them in the gallery’s window wall to accompany the photos of street gardens. They’re visible if you’re walking on the street outside.

KNT: The feeling I get from your work is that it's very careful. You're not hoarding materials, but rather it's a deliberate record of your collecting and working process. The way that these materials are chosen and organized and brought into the space goes back to the improvisational gardens. You’ve breathed new life into them here, reasserting their usefulness. The shoes at the door are very curious and escaped me the first visit but now as I sit here and revisit the work, I can see how they operate as a key. 

SL: Yes, that’s The Road Less Traveled, a pair of shoes outfitted with functioning boat compasses. I’m thinking about a sense of orientation, disorientation, reorientation. It’s one of the earliest works in the show and I presented them within a series of drawings this time. The form that’s revisited in those drawings is a pile of stones I encountered in the mountains in South Korea. The pile is like a collective form of orientation, where one person comes along the path and places a stone, and then the next, and so on. For me, the pile can be a marker of place while also mirroring the form of a mountain. For this exhibition, I placed the shoes at the gallery’s entrance with a selection of drawings. The series unfolded over ten years as a project running parallel to my sculpture and installation work.

KNT: I'm thinking about this push and pull between the built environment and the “natural environment” in the way that you installed mesh using the architecture of the space. And I really appreciate that and how it leads us to these architectural pieces with the fermented peppers. And they're referencing a type of architectural scaffolding, correct?

SL: Yes, they’re made with bamboo stakes I covered with plaster. In the rural villages, construction sometimes involved big bamboo poles used to create the scaffolding. I decided to construct a ghosted version, built on top of rolling pallets. But within the structure are signals of hand-made wisdom, such as woven red yarn and recipes for red peppers.

KNT: I feel like your work is so much about life. They seem so formal at first glance but by taking extra time one can see that there's a living process happening–that the peppers are changing throughout the exhibit which builds on the idea of resilience in the architectural works.

SL: Yes, I included them ground, as a paste, and fermenting. Within this environment of rice vinegar, the red pepper becomes another version of itself over time, another state altogether. That's something I feel close affinity with– materials and places have many lives, depending upon the changing conditions. For example, when I lived in Beijing, the street vendors’ temporary structures were repeatedly pushed out from before the city decided to pour asphalt to create a paved parking lot, a kind of erasure of that lived space. I bring black asphalt into my sculptures and drawings sometimes.

HM: Thinking about paved spaces, I'd love to talk about The Walking Mountain (Paved). 

SL: This is part of a series I made with electrical wire that I collected from construction sites in Seoul, and then in Beijing. It was like a material vocabulary that I’d see again and again. The wire became strangely familiar, so I’d pick it up and then use it in different ways. For this piece, I repeatedly shaped it into the word ‘mountain’ and then used string to attach and knot each together, layering each word one over another, making its own form of a pile. It’s a form that I keep encountering in the landscape, and in different ways–surrounding mountains, piles of materials waiting to be used for construction like bricks and concrete, piles of rubble left behind from demolition, burial mounds in the countryside. Wherever I am or where I move to–it's a familiar form that becomes internalized. Perhaps the material that makes sense for that new piece may change, but there's a familiarity with each encounter.

HM: The script letters are stitched together with such beauty and care. There's this balance between spontaneity and improvisation…and care–whether it's like stitching, or the care with which the pavers are put together in Sidewalk Soswaewon. That balance is also present in the improvisational, delicate drawings in your series of works on paper, The Walking Mountain. 

SL: I’m really inspired by street gardens for that reason. There’s so much care in taking familiar materials and placing them in a way that has a perspective, a point of view. I remember one day coming upon a giant pile of what appeared to be ‘stuff’. But when I went around to the other side of the pile, it snapped into focus as an improvised garden. There was a plastic tub with water in it, rocks, a glass pane, potted plants–it all just made sense. And then I realized there was a door for an apartment nearby, so when the resident comes out each day they see the garden from their point of view, right? It's that kind of reframing, where something can be another version of itself from a different perspective through care and intention.

A challenge I consider for some works is, to what extent does it allow itself to be an approximation? Once a work is resolved, I have a framework for that piece. But that framework is reinterpreted. For example, with Seeds in a Wild Garden, each time I show it, I re-enact a ritual, placing each piece to create the form. Depending on the context, it’ll be a little bit different each time but the framework lives on, almost like a musical score. Garden spaces themselves are carefully designed, but they’re constantly having to be tended to and can become overgrown. Over time, they're not the same garden they were before, they’re an approximation, a continuation, a new and current state.

Sandra Eula Lee: The Walking Mountain is on view at the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery from April 2 - May 25, 2024.

Sandra Eula Lee is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited internationally. She is Assistant Professor of Art at Montclair State University and Head of Visual Art. Through her artwork, Lee explores migration and urban/rural development by investigating materials and making in her sculptures, installations, and drawings. Moving across the land, images and sensations develop into a reflection on landscape, considering cultural memory, development narratives, and future ecology.

Kristen Neville Taylor is an Philadelphia artist whose diverse practice combines drawing, sculpture, and glass which converge playfully in installation style environments. Her work considers the impact of the stories we tell about nature calling attention to the systems and events that establish definitions and shape public perception of the environment. She is a co-founder of The Green Sun, a multifaceted project focused on the intersection of art and policy as they relate to the history of energy, energy democracy and possible energy futures. Taylor is the recipient of the Pew Fellowship, Laurie Wagman Prize in Glass, a RAIR Recycled Artist-in-Residence, and a Penn Program for the Environmental Humanities Artist-in-Residence.

Heather Moqtaderi is the founder and artistic director of Past Present Projects, where she curates and organizes contemporary art exhibitions and programs. Moqtaderi focuses on projects that bring together material culture, history, and contemporary artistic practice. As an extension of her curatorial practice, Moqtaderi publishes Past Present, a bi-annual journal of artist interviews and reviews of exhibitions, books, and music. She teaches art history and museum studies courses at Drexel University, University of the Arts and University of Pennsylvania.