BIO 背景
Born in Taipei, 1980. Lee Shapiro is a Taiwanese-American multidisciplinary artist, educated in product design and visual communication in Toronto, Canada. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Her work explores personal and collective identities diversified through the lenses of war, migration, colonial history, and the influences of non-linear popular culture.
A true garmento and artisan by day, she has worked with many prominent brands and ateliers over the past two decades, in Asia, North America and Europe. She has also performed music in underground venues and embarked on street art missions in midnight alleys worldwide.
Statement 宣言
Every piece I create begins with questioning institutional aesthetics and pre-established cultural hierarchies with the desire to portray my authentic perspectives. Through imagining, constructing, deconstructing, observing, repairing and redefining – a process I call aesthetic warfare – the fortuitous outcome produces variable angles and a state of disorientation. There the core narratives can begin.
With a love of abstract storytelling, I have assembled these pieces over the span of a decade, often arriving at the finished work through a series of detours, veering from the originally intended form. The resulting work is unrecognizable, utilizing the power of time to conjure, contour and compress our realities into a new space and capacity. It is a scalable approach, similar to writing poetry and composing music.
The employed media: fiber, photography, paper collages, paints, ceramic sculptures, textiles and recycled objects; represent my training as product designer and photographer. It is natural to extend their lives outside the world of commerce and explore them as cultural entities, further reading into the symbolism and collective memory each medium carries at different times, as well the potential to stretch and achieve in communication and artistry.