Faces is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. It brings together new sculptural works that build upon the artist’s recent installations, alongside two early video pieces and a new series of wall-based works. The title Faces refers both to a new body of work and an older video piece by Lee. These works explore emotional states, whether relating to traumatic events or moments of suffering, and how we perceive them.

Bearing the same title, and created for this exhibition, Faces (2025) is a suite of paintings created by manipulating pigmented methylcellulose, sometimes on its own, other times applying it to delicate swaths of polyester construction mesh and other fabrics. A thickening agent, the methylcellulose contracts as it dries, gripping and pulling at the textile fibers in a way that suggests torn skin and generates many different compositions and surface qualities. Each of the Faces has its own aura, and together with the series’ title, suggests a nameless crowd—victims, perhaps, of violence and terror. Suffering is implied through the dark red-brown tinting and lacerated membranes, but also beauty, transformation and redemption.

Two new series of concrete sculptures titled Heads and Poles form a central part of the show. Lee’s sculptures regularly evoke the human body, and Heads continues this exploration through the classical motif of the bust. Skull-like in shape, with molded concrete surfaces reminiscent of bone, these forms twist improbably upon one another.

Two early video works explore themes of voyeurism and violence. Faces (2016), for example, isolates brief excerpts from Japanese pornography, focusing solely on the moments just before aggression begins.

In contrast, Sleeping Mom (2020) presents a quiet, intimate image of Lee’s mother peacefully sleeping. The video is still, uneventful, and meditative. As it loops, it evokes something familiar: the rhythm of night, a sense of inner restfulness, and the quiet possibility of awakening.

In this combination of past and present works and materials, Lee transforms the gallery into a sensorial landscape of tension and fragility, where fluids and trembling structures evoke bodily systems pushed to their limits, caught between construction and disintegration. The result is an atmosphere that is simultaneously estranging and intimate; in its depths we recognize the intensities of the human experience.