Art & Karaoke with Raina Lee

We are back with Season 5 of The Side Woo podcast and our first guest is LA-based artist Raina Lee. Thibault and Raina talk about life in and out of LA after the fires in January, karaoke as an art form, ceramics and feng shui.

About Raina Lee

Raina Lee is a second-generation Taiwanese-American artist working in ceramic sculpture and installation. She is an author and zine publisher, having written in creative-nonfiction and technology for fifteen years. In the ceramics, she is known for her experimental glazes and textured surface vessels. In her current practice, she combines sculpture and ceramic glaze paintings, creating installations of significant moments in art history. Her work highlights the ways non-Western cultures and art practices have influenced the Western art canon. While acknowledging that cultural influence goes in all directions, Lee questions what is interpretation versus cultural appropriation, and how the boundaries between these reflect structures of power, class, and colonialism. She explores Asian diasporic identity, displacement, and the erosion of time through a material practice. She draws from classical Chinese, Greek, and Persian art history. She has worked in 3D-clay printing as an artist-in-residence at the Expressive Computation Lab at University of California, Santa Barbara and has also made functional ceramics. Other residencies include Watershed (Maine), High Desert Test Sites (Joshua Tree), Texere (Oaxaca), Ikea Residency (Los Angeles), and Salmon Creek Farm (Mendocino).

Her work is influenced video games, science fiction futurism, and a Southern California immigrant upbringing. She grew up between Taiwan and her parent’s pizzaria in Torrance, California. Her work has been featured in press worldwide, including The New York Times: T Magazine, Surface Magazine, and MilK Decoration. She is the author of Hit Me With Your Best Shot: The Ultimate Guide To Karaoke Domination (Chronicle Books) and publisher of cult zine about technology and gaming culture, 1-Up MegaZine. She has a B.A. in sociology from U.C. Davis and M.A. in Film and Media Studies from the New School.

Email: rainaleeshop at gmail.com
Instagram: @rainajlee

Watch this episode on our YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ-tTvznWMQ