Serena Lee

Be water, my friend: unsettling personhood through embodied practices and polyphonic narrative

Drawing from the cyclic transformation of liquid and gas as a model of relationality, my research attends to and unsettles notions of personhood. I am interested in the transformational circulation of water and air as a narrative shape through which we might reconsider how force is generated, deliquesce notions of self, and attune to polyphonic orientations. 

Grounded in the practice of the internal martial art of tai chi chu’an, ways of accessing drinkable water, and artistic experimentation with fountains, my research entwines various forms of circulatory systems through interrelated threads that consider what we ingest, how we move, and how we inhabit place. Central to and centred in my research are knowledges from Turtle Island Indigenous cultures and traditional Chinese medicine and philosophy, so as to critique colonial, humanist ontological formations and systems of knowledge production. 

Serena Lee’s artistic practice stems from a fascination with polyphony and its radical potential. She works across disciplines, collaboratively and aleatorically. Serena holds an MFA from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, an Associate Diploma in Piano Performance from the Canadian Royal Conservatory of Music, and was born in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada.