Caroline Ricca Lee

n.São Paulo, BR (1990)

An artist and researcher whose practice traverses sculpture, installation, writing, performance, and video, reclaiming ancestral narratives of Asian diasporas in Brazil and Latin America. From decolonial feminist and queer perspectives, their work intertwines memory, archiving, and fiction: a weaving of unofficial histories inscribed in home, body, and objects. The syncretic aesthetics of their production reveal a repertoire in which Asian ancestry and Brazilian culture collide, generating a noisy aesthetic intrinsic to the tapestry of a multicultural and diasporic identity. Through imagination and representation, Lee engages with memory preserved in alternative records such as personal archives, ancestral memorabilia, family photographs, and corporeal cartographies.

Recipient of the ISOLA SICILIA Prize 2023 at the 30th edition of Artissima Fair (Turin, Italy), Lee was also selected in 2025 by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia South America. They have been artist-in-residence at Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Waldberta, Germany (2016); Fondazione Oelle, Italy (2024); Pivô Pesquisa, Brazil (2024); IASPIS, Sweden (2025); La Becque, Switzerland (2025). Exhibition highlights include: Recollection of Dreams (Tube Culture Hall, Milan, 2024); The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America & the Caribbean (Americas Society, New York, 2024); terra abrecaminhos (SESC Pompeia, São Paulo, 2023); 1st National Salon of Contemporary Art of Goiás (Museum of Contemporary Art of Goiás, Goiânia, 2022); 31st Exhibition Program (Centro Cultural 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