Aki Lee was born in Changsha, China, in the early 1990s. She grew up in Shenzhen and is currently based in Vienna. As a practitioner, she has been actively practiced in socially engaged art, with grounded experiences in the antagonistic project context of urban renewal and social transformation since 2014. With a nuanced understanding of power dynamics and the interplay between bureaucracy and society, her artistic and social practices often explore issues of diaspora, locality, the production of space, invisibilities, as well as dive into the intricate dynamics of community building and collaboration. 

In her early career, she was 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 DesignSociety, 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 2019 Nanshan Cultural Festival. In 2020, she co-initiated Critical Spatial Practices in China conference with Virginia Lui at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

In recent years, 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. The first-person experiences and sensations are widely collected, collectively edited, and translated into printed materials or embodied workshops across different times and locations. These interactive workshops and collective game design serve as a means of fostering mutual connections in both the process of nurturing the relational quality of a place and knowledge transformation on site. Such efforts are imbued with educational aims to foster understanding and empathy among people from diverse backgrounds as well as bridging the community and society. 

In her doctoral research exploring the notion of participation, she examines the historical trajectories of social practices led by forefront leftist intellectuals. Through an intersecting lens of the East and West, she explores how participation has been central to these practices and how it interweaves and influences the threads of today. Lately, her work extends to land, cultivation, and the significance of plants and food in daily life.