Kerry Ann Lee (MDes)
Senior Lecturer, Communication
Kerry Ann Lee is a visual artist, designer and educator from New Zealand. Her practice explores cultural intersections occurring in the space between private moments and public locations. With a background in Communication Design, she creates art and design that is both expressive and socially engaged, playfully investigating issues of identity and hybrid cultural formations through hand-made processes.
Lee is also known for her work in underground publishing and punk fanzines enjoying international exposure and cult readership over the past 13 years. Between 2002- 2005, Lee published The Red Letter, an independent distribution catalogue carrying over one hundred zines, comics and small press titles from around the world.
Kerry Ann Lee’s creative practice and academic research has explored issues and understandings around Cantonese Chinese urban settlement in the Asia Pacific region during the 19th Century – in particular Chinatowns, As an artist of third-generation Chinese decent, Lee’s work meditates on themes of home, difference and hybridity.
In 2007, Lee was a recipient of the Asia New Zealand Emerging Researcher Award, and in 2008, she created Home Made, a lavishly illustrated artist book that celebrated an alternative cultural history of Chinese settlement in New Zealand, through cut-paper, paint, found text and images. The project evolved into a national touring art exhibition and seminar series.
Lee received a Fulbright Award to attend the Summer Residency Program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City in June 2009, and in September 2009, she was an artist-in-residence at island6 Art Centre Shanghai through the WARE (Wellington Asia Residency Exchange) Program. She was a feature artist in the Centennial Celebration of Women in Art Exhibition at the Shanghai Art Museum, returned to Shanghai for a solo show, AM Park, at am artspace Gallery and selected as an international artist-in-residence for Visible City, the keynote event for the Melbourne Fringe Festival in October 2010.
Currently working as a Communication Design Lecturer at Otago Polytechnic School of Design, Dunedin, Lee’s artwork can be found in private collections, the NZ Ambassador to China’s residency, public libraries, bedroom walls, zine and record collections throughout New Zealand, Australia, Europe, US and China.