Pieta was created for UNTITLED, San Francisco Monuments Program, to be showcased at the Palace of Fine Arts. The main feature of the work entails two opposing video projections, one in the form of Mary and the other Jesus. Lee invited an artist in Italy to submit the image of Mary, thus bringing the distant geographic and emotional realities into the nearness of a repetitive forming and dissolution of the tableau vivant. The two opposing projections pass through each other and cast singular images on opposite walls. However, the two projections meet in the middle of the installation space on moving diaphanous fabric panels where a pieta-like image is formed. Lee's work focuses on the themes of absence/presence, light/dark and the notion of "into the nearness of distance".

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Summer Lee’s recent work critiques the effects of the neo/new diaspora, centering on the themes of displacement and migration of peoples resulting from geo-political conflicts and globalization. Lee ‘s forthcoming exhibition this fall, titled Requiem, commissioned by Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco pays homage to Hong Kong’s Tung Wah Hospital’s role in the repatriation of Chinese immigrant bones to China. Lee’s research of the bone boxes in Hong Kong, Kaiping and China will also be featured in a documentary film.

For more information on the work of Summer Lee, please click here.