Born in Daegu, South Korea, Hayoon Jay Lee obtained a BFA in sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2007, and an MFA degree from the Rinehart School of Sculpture at MICA in 2009.

Among her many honors and awards, Lee has received a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship award (2008) from the U.S. Department of Education, a Full Fellowship Artist in Residency Award (2012) from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, a best in show distinction award (2008) at the 14th International Exhibition at the SoHo 20 Gallery in Chelsea, New York City, and a Dapu International Art Award (2011) from the Northern Art Museum, Daqing China. She has exhibited her work widely, both nationally and internationally. In recent years, Lee has shown her art, created installations, and held performances in New York (John Jay College, Jamaica Center for Arts, King Manor Museum, Gallery 456, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts), Maryland (Montgomery College), South Korea (Gwangju Museum of Art and Kim Man-duk Museum), China (Guangzhou Fine Arts University Museum), and Poland (University of Krakow), among other locations.

Lee has participated in various artist residency programs including the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA: 2009), the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT: 2009), Sculpture Space (Utica, NY: 2011), Gwangju Museum of Art (S. Korea: 2012), 99 Museum (Beijing, China: 2014), Byrdcliffe Artist in Residence Program (Woodstock, NY: 2012), and Art Farm (Marquette, NE: 2016).

Her work may be found in the collections of the Zimmerli Museum (2021), the Gwangju Contemporary Museum of Art (Gwangju, Korea: 2017), the Henan Museum (Zhengzhou, China: 2010), the QCC Art Gallery (Queens, NY: 2015), the Community School of Maryland (Brookville, MD: 2004), the Dapu International Art Center (Daqing, China: 2011), the Hollis Taggart Gallery (Chelsea, NY: 2021), Asheville Art Museum (Asheville, NC:2023), and many private collections. She has a studio at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in NYC.

Hayoon Jay Lee is a visual artist who explores the fundamental tension between indulgence and abnegation as it exists in terms of mind and body as well as on the level of social and political dynamics. Lee makes use of rice as an object, motif, metaphor, and visceral biomorphic form. As a building block for civilizations and as a link to the collective unconscious, rice allows her to create a visual echo reflecting points of conflict, oscillating between attraction and repulsion, between Orient and Occident, with the aim of inspiring self-reflection and ultimately producing conditions for healing and harmony.

Lee’s paintings contain crowds of figures embedded in rice forms, emphasizing the symbiosis between rice and life, the seemingly countless, clearly defined grains suggesting infinite regeneration. In high and low reliefs, she meditatively arranges individual grains of rice into a surface with modeling paste to create physical and emotional topographies. In 3D works, rice is transformed into a pyramid or a grid of 3,000 handcrafted rice “bowls” that speak paradoxically of longing and fulfillment, not to mention Buddhist concepts of suffering and seeking Enlightenment. Her installations may also take the shape of mounds of rice occupying vast spaces underneath sacks of rice hanging in rows. These emotion-laden landscapes lay just beyond our reach; the extensive fields of rice seem to glow with their own inner light, yet each element of these constructs is formed by a single grain tentatively holding onto its place in the larger macrocosmic setting. Through interactive performances, she hopes to open a dialog with audiences, to create a new community of strangers, with eyes open to a more textured, multi-layered reality