AKI LEE

Aki Lee was born in Changsha, grew up in Shenzhen, and is currently based in Vienna. As a practitioner, she has been actively practicing in socially engaged art, with grounded experience in the antagonistic project context of urban renewal and social transformation since 2014. Her artistic and social practices often explore issues of diaspora, the production of space, as well as delve into the intricate dynamics of community building and collaborations. She has designed three board games as her primary tactics for participation and placemaking. Grounded in rigorous field research and theoretical study, she employed a blend of serious playfulness and analogue gaming through collaboration with members of specific communities with a nuanced understanding of power dynamics and the interplay between bureaucracy and society. 

In her doctoral research, she explores the notion of participation by tracing the historical trajectories of social practices led by forefront leftist intellectuals. Through an intersecting lens of the East and West, how participation has been central to these practices and how it interweaves and influences the threads of today. 

In her early career, she's devoted to urbanism and the cultural sectors and worked in the architecture field with O-office Architects for over five years, focusing strongly on industrial heritage and urban villages in the Pearl River Delta region of China. Later, she was responsible for Learning and Public Programs at Design Society, China’s first design museum jointly founded by China Merchants and the British V&A Museum, and initiated the Shekou Value Factory Design Weekend within the framework of the 2019 Nanshan Cultural Festival. In 2020, she co-initiated the Critical Spatial Practices in China conference with Virginia Lui at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She is also a member of VBKÖ (Association of Austrian Women Artists), the IG Bildende Kunst, and Mai Ling (Asian Artists' Collective based in Vienna).