Roy Subum Lee is a Sydney-based artist working across digital and film photography, installation, and sculpture. His work examines how institutional structures produce and naturalise the boundaries between safety and danger – and the subtle ways those boundaries embed themselves within ordinary life.
His current project, What We Hold, traces the unstable boundary between sanctioned force and harm through reconstructed photographs and installation. Working through gun culture and its materiality, the project deliberately juxtaposes spaces perceived as safe or dangerous, relocates ammunition into the studio to alter cultural meaning, and reconstructs surveilled conditions through the scope of a rifle. Earlier bodies of work include Unforbidden Ruralscapes, which reconfigures aerial drone imagery of the Australian outback into spherical compositions that attend to the geometries of rural land use, and Enigmatic Land, which reconstructs topography and landscape to surface the layered narratives of human life embedded within the environment.
Alongside his practice, Lee has organised international exhibitions between Australian and Korean artists for more than ten years, including Inflection at the Korean Cultural Centre, Sydney, in 2024. He holds a Master of Arts in Photomedia from the University of New South Wales and a Bachelor of Arts in Sculpture from Hongik University. His work has been exhibited in Australia and internationally.
