Interview with Jaebin Lee: Reimagining Catholicism
On malleable bodies, blurred borders, and the art of reimagining what we were born inside
Guest Jaebin Lee Interviewer Edgar Zhang
Jaebin Lee's practice occupies a rare and necessary space, one that refuses the comfort of easy categorization. Working across video, performance, sculpture, and AI imaging, Lee does not critique religion so much as she inhabits it, turning its symbols, structures, and contradictions inside out to reveal something far more personal, fluid, and unresolved.
To understand her work is to understand that it begins not in ideology, but in the body. Specifically, in the body of a young woman who grew up inside a devout Korean Catholic household, absorbing its rituals, its binaries, and its contradictions long before she had the language to question them. The turning point came during a trip to Mexico in her senior year of college, where she witnessed the Easter reenactment of the crucifixion of Jesus, people carrying their own crosses through the streets. The sheer overwhelming physicality of collective faith sent her back to university to minor in religious studies, not to reject what she saw, but to understand it.
This is a crucial distinction that runs through everything she makes: Jaebin Lee is not an artist who left the church and turned against it. She is an artist who never fully belonged to it, yet cannot leave it behind.
View Jaebin Lee’s The Day the Ears Came Out on DART Magazine.
