ENDPAPERS

Endpapers presents Megan Lee’s ongoing and new works, created after living in Asia as part of Soup’s inaugural artist abroad experience, Soup Satellite. This initiative creates pathways for artists and connects friends from around the world.

In book design, endpapers mark the threshold between the outside world and the inner world of a book, bridging the cover and the pages. Similarly, Megan’s paintings and companion installation of moving image, sound, and sculptural paper works reflect her habit of living with her work over time and across space, connecting her New York studio with the countryside of southern Japan and the bustle of Hong Kong. Endpapers brings forward what is often in the background—subtle textures of experience, quiet observations, and the design of lived memory that ties these disparate places together in a legible manifestation.

During her residency in Ukiha, Japan, Megan experimented with video, photography, and watercolor, prioritizing mediums that are easily transportable. Bringing these fragments back to her apartment, she continued to paint over previously exhibited pieces, processing personal history and exploring cultural heritage through new friendships that have catalyzed a new creative phase.

The presented video captures Megan’s personal flow within the rhythm and culture of Ukiha, an artisan community active in Japan’s original tea region. Nori Tanaka of Omnicent, Soup’s residency partner organization, recorded the drumbeat soundscape accompaniment, enhancing the collaborative ethos of this experience.

Megan's acrylic paintings on canvas and photographic watercolor paintings on paper intersperse, capturing impressions from her trip both tangible and intangible, abstract and figurative—from the ephemeral quality of air in natural landscapes to a gifted book of Meiji-era photography from a local artisan. Together, these works convey an enlightening and curiously nostalgic feeling, inspiring her transition to an impressionistic style.

As with many of her series, Megan painted over past works, layering colors and textures and embracing chance as part of the process. These palimpsests hold memory and lived experience, emphasizing that what we carry exists now, changing simultaneously.

“Remember to Forget” is an evolving mixed media installation that interrupts habits of accumulation. Since 2014, Megan has folded notes, sketches, and lists into paper cranes. This is the third installation of Megan’s cranes, previously shown attached to two upright panels inside a lighthouse in Silver Lake, Los Angeles and mounted on large-scale floor panels inside a schoolhouse gallery in Connecticut.

In its current iteration, cranes are attached to mirrored surfaces in 16x8 formation, "reflecting pools" banded by a rounded rock garden where wood-fired ceramics and an ancient slab of petrified wood are nestled—gifts from artist friends Megan met in Ukiha and Hong Kong—tempering the gallery environment with water-inspired and earth-borne elements, suggestive of flow and growth.

Folded and floating, each crane carries the energy of an idea released into the ether. Over time, this repetitive practice has become a grounding ritual, offered to us as a way to move forward, letting go of what was and making space for what’s next.

Megan Lee is a New York-based Korean-American artist and graphic designer. She received the Peter D’Albert ‘70 Memorial Art Award upon graduating from Hotchkiss in 2013, attended the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, and earned her BFA from Pratt Institute. Megan has produced two solo exhibitions at Chinatown Soup and participated in various residencies and group shows across New York. Her digital design work has won four Cannes Lions and eleven Clio Awards at Deloitte Digital.

Earlier this year, Megan participated in the inaugural Soup Satellite Artist Residency program at Omnicent in Ukiha, Japan, which inspired the body of work on view. Prior to her Japan residency, Megan worked with graphic designer Henry Steiner of Steiner & Co. in Hong Kong, where she dreams of making art again.

Endpapers is on view at Soup Gallery from July 9–27, 2025.