Joyce Lee

Baron is pleased to present artist Joyce Lees debut book, dedicated to the artists archive of watercolour and pencil works, exploring aspects of love, sex and sexuality, and the human body. Like the surrealists before her, Lees work seeks to explore the subconscious. Using lucid landscapes and the body, the artist mixes high culture with trash culture, the picturesque with the disgusting and the two activities of living, humour and sex. Lee places us in a world with perverse personal thoughts and multiple realities. In our image-sharing society, where photography depicting sexuality and the human body is prohibited and censored, Lees work manages to challenge such rules by creating work around sex and the body, in the media of watercolour and pencil, deemed acceptable in these spaces to communicate such themes. As such, Lees work has found contemporary relevance on social networks, with liberators wanting to challenge ongoing censorship rules around the human body and sex, by sharing the artists work. Lees work has been published internationally and received critical praise from publications including Numero and Playboy Magazine. The book also contains an essay by academic Pernilla Ellens editor of Namio Harukawa (Baron 2021) and Death Book lll (Baron 2022).