Caroline Ricca Lee

n.São Paulo, BR (1990)

Caroline Ricca Lee is an artist and researcher whose practice explores the archiving, history, fiction, and memory within Asian narratives from Latin America, drawing from decolonial feminism, queer studies, and crip theory. Works with sculpture, installation, critical writing, performance, and video. Addresses an unofficial memory preserved in alternative documentation such as personal histories, ancestral memorabilia, family photographs, and corporeal cartographies. The household becomes a bodily extension of an imagined motherland. The syncretic gaze of their production reveals a repertoire in which Asian ancestry, Brazilian culture, and the unsolved legacy of European colonialism collide to create a noisy body of work inherent to the tapestry of a multicultural and diasporic identity. By object-making, Lee symbolizes an ancestral unspeakable, thus reclaiming an alternative understanding of a collective memory archive through speculative imagination.

Artist-in-residence at Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Waldberta, Germany (2016); Fondazione Oelle, Italy (2023); Pivô Art and Research, Brazil (2024); IASPIS, Sweden (2025); La Becque, Switzerland (2025); Jan van Eyck Academie, Netherlands (2026). Awardee of the ISOLA SICILIA Prize at Artissima, Torino, in 2023. Recipient of The Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia South America in 2025.

Selected exhibitions: Letters to Memory (SESC Paulista, São Paulo, 2025); What Sinks Still Sings (SALTS, Basel, 2025); rest at risk (Pivô, São Paulo, 2025); Recollection of Dreams (Tube Culture Hall, Milan, 2024); The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America & the Caribbean (America’s Society, New York, 2024); terra abrecaminhos (SESC Pompéia, São Paulo, 2023); 31° Exhibition Program (Cultural Center of São Paulo, São Paulo, 2021).

We might say that the artistic practice of Caroline Ricca Lee is constructed from fabrics and weavings, molds and filaments — if it were not, above all, the body that confronts us. Endowed with memory, the body remakes itself through speculations of what remains unsaid, yet, in a circular choreography, enunciates its traces through embroidery, archival photographs, and the many masks that clothe us as traditional sites of belonging, displacement, and conflict.

Diane Lima

Adhering to furniture and objects, the anatomy of the fragmented body encrusts material and subjective scars onto domestic artifacts, shaping metaphors for the intimate universe of individuals and the familial constellations they inhabit. These constellations, in turn, form one of the most intricate weaves—the fabric of Asian-Brazilian communities.

Maíra Freitas

Through sculpture, text, video, performance, and installation, Ricca reclaims an ancestral body and the narratives of the Asian diaspora in Brazil. Between dream and trauma, in a kind of speculative memory fiction rooted in decolonial, queer, and feminist epistemologies, diverse materials and temporalities come into play, provoking shifts, apparitions, and reunions. Material and phantasmagorically shrill, their work reshapes a notion of nostalgia, turning it into a piercing gesture toward the present, like a "blade sharpened by cutting," as Vuong would say (...)

Mônica Hoff