Yian Lee’s artistic practice emerges from an ongoing, entangled dialogue with the idea of belonging.

Having left her birthplace nearly a decade ago, the word home has grown increasingly ambiguous. Looking back on her childhood, she recalls a space that, while filled with familial love, often felt suppressive—a place where expressing her true self was neither easy nor safe. It wasn’t resentment that remained, but a quiet realization: belonging isn’t always something offered from the outside; sometimes, it is something we must patiently grow from within.

Her creative process begins at this threshold. Rather than using figurative images to revisit memories, Lee turns to abstract geometries and fluid lines to trace an inner state that defies clear articulation yet is deeply felt. Her painting process often weaves in meditation and card-drawing rituals, transforming the making into a form of dialogue with the self. She believes that consciousness is inherently free, not bound to place or defined by role. The labels we cling to are not our essence but temporary garments we wear along the way.

Her paintings have no recognizable objects or literal narratives, yet something quiet moves beneath the surface. A subtle order, a rhythm of emotion, drifts through the composition. The layered forms and interlacing lines suggest that true belonging may not lie in fixed answers, but in learning to dwell within uncertainty, in accepting the fluid and often fragmented nature of the self.

At times, a branch-like form gently appears—a line that extends outward, splits, and wanders. It grows not according to a plan but as thought does: unpredictably, patiently, over time. These moments feel like glimpses of the inner terrain taking shape.

Lee’s work feels like a soft meditation in progress, a puzzle of self always in the making. Here, the viewer is not asked to decipher, but simply to pause and feel. And perhaps, in a quiet moment, to encounter their oasis within—a sense of belonging that asks for nothing more than presence.