Yik Heng Lee

MFA Textiles

Conversations with A Man

This body of work explores the grid as a vehicle for narrative, tracing its presence across the history of abstraction, the structure of architecture, and the ancient craft of weaving. Grounded in the thresholds of interior space—windows, doors, the surfaces that divide inside from outside—the installation stages the grid as simultaneously structure and skin, a framework that both organizes and flattens the world it touches.

At the center of the work are textile surfaces in conversation: Jacquard-woven fabrics, framed and suspended or laid across the ground, that together activate the room as a kind of lived-in, temporal interior. These surfaces hold within them flattened conditions—ideological, spatial, systematic—while hovering at the boundary between painting and textile, refusing to settle fully into either.

Craft here is understood broadly: not only as the labor of weaving, but as a mode of authorship, a way of making images and encoding meaning through material and repetition. Through the convergence of printed, painted, and woven surfaces, the work unsettles the boundaries between media and between the familiar and the strange. What we recognize, we are made to see differently by announcing its difference; what feels unfamiliar is slowly, surreptitiously rendered legible.

Ultimately, the installation examines how surfaces perform within interior space—how they carry history, narrative, and perception—and positions the grid as the site where all three intersect.

A woven textile pattern repeating a pixelated image of two men kissing, arranged in a four-part grid. Color shifts and layered yarn threads partially obscure and fragment the figures across the fabric

Two Men Kissing (after reading Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo)
2025
52 3/4" x 69" x 1 1/2"
Cotton, Linen, Monofilament, Mohair, Perle Cotton, Polyester, Rayon, Viscose; Jacquard Woven

A woven curtain reproducing a painting of a courtyard viewed from within. The composition is divided by a window grid opposite, its panes structuring fields of warm sunset-lit color

Gazing (a) window-gazing Window
2025
52 1/4” x 71 1/2” x 3 1/2”
Cotton, Perle Cotton, Polyester, Viscose; Jacquard Woven

Two handwoven textiles hung side by side, each depicting a pattern derived from an Italian Renaissance building. The pieces mirror one another with an unsettling, near-identical symmetry

Taking Place (Diptypch)
2024
Pattern I: 32” x 41” (left), Pattern II: 32” x 36” (right)
Cotton, Bassard Cotton, Cottolin, Perle Cotton, Rayon, Mohair, Silk; Handwoven