Harper’s is pleased to announce Possibly, Here, New York-based Hong Kong artist Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee’s first solo exhibition in New York City. The presentation features a new body of works on aluminum that engages botany as a historical lens on memory, belonging, and home. It opens January 15, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist.
Possibly, Here unfolds from Lee’s sustained engagement with uncertainty as it is preserved—and produced—by archives. The exhibition title references a photograph in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection dated to 1900, catalogued with unresolved geography and labeled as Possibly Hong Kong. Searching for the past of her homeland in a foreign collection, Lee encountered something more intimate than a proof: a resonance, since she grew up on a hillside when the harbor is framed through a living border. The archive becomes less a site of proof than one of affect, where familiarity and distance coexist, and history is felt as much as it is known.
The Hong Kong orchid tree (Bauhinia × Blakeana), which appears on Hong Kong’s currency in place of the Queen’s profile, and the opium poppy (Papaver Somniferum) recur not as fixed symbols but as unstable forms entangled with empire, trade, desire, and survival. Lee resists their emblematic status, relearning them as living organisms shaped by grafting and displacement. In the site-specific work, Poppy and Butterfly, Lee reimagines a gallery column as an opium pipe, folding a historical instrument of colonial control into the architecture of the exhibition itself. By juxtaposing depictions of living plants with their herbarium records, the works trace the infrastructures—scientific and political—that attempt to stabilize nature, revealing the tension between conservation and control.
This tension is echoed in Lee’s material practice. Working with found images sourced from museum archives, botanical collections, and personal media, she engraves imagery onto aluminum surfaces used for mass image reproduction historically and storage material in present-day seed banks. Translating photographic certainty into the tactile labor of engraving, Lee introduces hesitation into the image-making process. Light and shadow become active components of the work, producing images that shift and defy a single, stable reading.
The resulting works hover between drawing, sculpture, and afterimage—objects that change with conditions of light, and the movement of the viewer. In this site of instability, Lee locates a parallel to memory itself which is fragmented and malleable. Possibly, Here proposes that the idea of home may not be a fixed destination, but an ongoing process of searching—through far roots and near flora, through archives that name and misname, through flowers that bloom as both symbols and living things. Possibly, here.
Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee (b. 1992, Hong Kong, China) received an MFA from Columbia University in 2025; she has participated in numerous artist residencies at institutions, including Tiger Strikes Asteroid/Transmitter Gallery, Brooklyn; Keramikkünstlerhaus, Neumünster, DE; and Taipei International Artist Village, TW. Lee’s work has been the subject of presentations at Kyoto Art Center, JP (2023); and Lumenvisum, Hong Kong (2017). Most recently, her work was included in group exhibitions at Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong (2025); Below Grand, New York (2024); SK Gallery, New York (2024); WMA, Hong Kong (2024); 1A Space, Hong Kong (2023); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2022); and Karin Weber Gallery, Hong Kong (2021). Lee’s work has appeared in publications such as ArtAsiaPacific, Corridor8, and Hong Kong Free Press. She currently lives and works in New York City.