featured artists
to all the daphnes of the world
Turn pain into empowerment with artist, Soo Hyun Lee.
Soo Hyun Lee has long straddled cultural divides. Steeped in abstraction, her works disentangle cross-cultural realities while shedding light on elusive concepts such as hope, eternity, care, and grief. At the intersection of gender, race, and religion, art for her is a means to confront discrimination and rework personal challenges into a visual language of solidarity.
Soo Hyun is inspired by those who champion the anguished. Through her Daphne Series, she references the eponymous forest nymph who transfigures into a tree to escape Apollo’s relentless pursuit. In this sense, Daphne’s raw vulnerability and precarious mobility mirrors the experiences of countless transnational women who endure prejudice, harassment, and violence around the world. For Soo Hyun, Daphne’s metamorphosis captures both a descent into marginalization, and the resilience required to reclaim agency and heal wounds against the odds.
Soo Hyun’s depictions of skin and body convey a certain powerlessness and suffering, at the same time resisting these states through artistic expression. Her Daphne Series reimagines terrains inhabited by countless Daphnes, figures united by shared pain and standing together in arboreal unison. These Daphnes extend their branches to the oppressed, embodying an alternative vision of independence and inner strength for anyone whose mind and body bears the scars of a history of unrecognized violence.
With evocative brushstrokes, dynamic compositions, and multiple sheets of paper, Soo Hyun’s spatially-extended protagonists continue to grapple with and outpace the trauma, unfolding into visual narratives of resistance, renewal, and empowerment as they go.
