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 engaged in socially engaged art within the context of urban renewal since 2014. With a nuanced understanding of power dynamics and the interplay between bureaucracy and society, her artistic and social practices often delve into issues of diaspora, locality, the production of space, and invisibilities, as well as the intricate dynamics of community building and collaboration, particularly within the broader context of social transformation.

In recent years, Lee has designed three board games grounded in rigorous field research and theoretical study. She employs a blend of serious playfulness and analogue gaming as primary methodologies for her socially engaged art. Through collaboration with members of specific communities, first-person experiences and sensations are widely collected, collectively edited, and translated into printed materials or embodied workshops across different times and locations. In both the process of social participation and post-participatory production, interactive workshops and collective game design serve as a means of bringing together community members or audiences and fostering mutual connections among them.  Such efforts are imbued with educational aims to foster understanding and empathy among people from diverse backgrounds. Furthermore, her work extends to the significance of plants and food in the daily lives of urban dwellers, as she researches, communicates, and reimagines their historical, cultural, and political contexts across cultures.  

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 Design Society, China’s first design museum jointly founded by China Merchants Shekou 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.

Currently pursuing her doctoral research, Lee continues to develop her interests in food, land, cultivation, participation, and the dynamics of interpersonal relationships. Additionally, she is a visual artist who has been actively practicing across various digital media since 2012, including photography, video, and graphic works.