Caroline Ricca Lee
Artist in residence, Stockholm, 3 March–25 May 2025
Caroline Ricca Lee is an artist and researcher born in São Paulo, Brazil. Their work explores the archiving and memory of East Asian narratives in Brazil through decolonial, queer, and feminist epistemologies. They work across sculpture, installation, critical writing, performance, and video. Through imagination and politics of representation, Lee’s practice investigates unofficial memory, preserved through alternative documentation such as personal stories, ancestral memorabilia, and family photographs. For them, the household serves as an extension of an imagined motherland.
Photo: Wallace Domingues
Caroline Ricca Lee
Lee examines the concept of “home” as an unofficial museum, questioning the institutional appropriation of meanings attributed to non-hegemonic domestic objects and marginalized artistic practices in art history, particularly those shaped by markers of race, gender, sexuality, nation, or generation—for example, textiles and ceramics. Their syncretic gaze reveals a repertoire where Asian ancestry, Brazilian culture, and European structural-colonial heritage collide, producing a vibrant and complex body of work inherent to the tapestry of a multicultural identity.
While at IASPIS, Lee will work on the project “Body is a Relic”, expanding on an ongoing question in their research: “Is ancestry a form of fiction? If you have it, how do you keep it? If you don´t, how do you invent it?”, with the specific focus on reclaiming an ancestral body, beauty rituals, and Asian feminism. Asian identities—especially those gendered as female or queer—have been fetishized and objectified for more than a century. The rise of commercial transactions between Europe and Asia, in the 19th century, resulted in aesthetic and poetic movements such as Orientalism, Japonism, and Chinoiserie, which have perpetuated hegemonic imagery of docile and submissive, or exotic and dangerous individuals.
Even today, these colonial narratives are perpetuated through cultural vocabulary and traditional customs, calcified in the structures of arts, literature, cinema. They also manifest in the construction of love, where affection and desire also constitute power relations. Through object-making, writing, video, and performance, Lee seeks to present alternative understandings of collective memory. Their work uncovers a gendered and queer archive, revealing parallel narratives that assert agency, autonomy, and reparation.
Caroline Ricca Lee was a recipient of the ISOLA SICILIA Prize at the 30th Artissima Art Fair, Torino (2023), and was also nominated for the PIPA Prize (2023). They have been an artist-in-residence at Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Waldberta, Munich (2016); Fondazione Oelle, Sicily (2023); and Pivô Art and Research, São Paulo (2023). Selected exhibitions include: “Ana Mendieta: Silhueta de Fogo | terra abrecaminhos”, SESC Pompéia, São Paulo (2023); “From flight to nostrils, breathe, arms wide, messages in the wind”, HOA Gallery, São Paulo (2023); 1st National Contemporary Art Hall of Goiás, Museum of Contemporary Art of Goiás, Goiânia (2022); 31st Exhibition Program, Cultural Center of São Paulo, São Paulo (2021); “Curação”, Cultural Center of São Paulo, São Paulo (2020).
@carolinericcalee