Yona Lee is known for her large-scale site-specific installations which unfold in rhythmic compositions of tubular steel. Combining urban and domestic utilitarian objects and structures — such as handrails, lamps, curtains and chairs — her arrangements invite surprising and multi-layered readings. Lee’s work can be both playful and sinister, authoritarian and absurd.

A trained cellist, Lee’s sculptures resemble musical phrases or modular vocabularies: playable arrangements where pops of colour and texture might infer pitch, timbre, or instrumentation. She explores iteration and improvisation, attuning to the spatial parameters of each context akin to the way a musical score can be reperformed in diverse and nuanced ways. Smart sculpture is a new commission which responds to the work of 20th century Aotearoa artist Len Lye and his enduring interest in choreographing movement, evolving technologies, and kinetic sculpture using found objects.

Here, Lee questions what it means to make sculpture from found objects in the networked digital age, one where the Internet of Things — such as Smartphones, Smart Homes, and Smart Cities are increasingly pervasive. Where domestic objects are no-longer passive companions but behave instead like an ‘eye’ or an ‘ear’ in the home — always on, watching and listening, sequestering data about the intimate patterns of our lives.

Smart sculpture acts as a performative score, choreographing both audiences’ bodies and the subtly sensing motions of the devices which surround us. Lee reveals private and public spaces to be complex assemblages of forces, bound by invisible systems of freedom and control.

2025 Melbourne Art Fair Commission in partnership with Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre (Aotearoa). Supported by Artwork Transport.  

Represented by Fine Arts Sydney (Gadigal Country/Sydney, Singapore),  Booth D3.