Lisha Bai

Lisha Bai lives and works in Brooklyn and Long Island, New York. Her work has been exhibited at DC Moore, Deanna Evans Projects, Halsey McKay, Klaus von Nichtssagend, Fortnight Institute, and National Academy of Art, among other venues. She holds a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA from Yale School of Art.

Lisha Bai pieces together images of light and windows from many brightly-colored textiles, cutting and sewing them together to resemble light streaming through a window at various points of the day. Bai has long been interested in the interplay between illusionism and materiality in the history of modernism and in the Renaissance notion of paintings as windows. In these works that exist between paintings and curtains she playfully engages these ideas creating representations of light and windows that can engage the forms they represent.

Bai’s work also draws from her experience as a Korean American growing up in Alabama and is inspired by both bojagi, traditional Korean wrapping cloths constructed from a variety of different fabrics, as well as quiltmakers from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, whose compositions defy their materiality. For Bai, the piecework technique of joining different fabrics together is also a visual metaphor for the piecing together of different influences.

EXHIBITIONS:
NADA MIAMI 2025
ExtraOrdinary, 2025
Off-Kilter with Halsey McKay, 2025
Lisha Bai, After Hours, 2023

RECENT PRESS:
Galerie Magazine
Cultured Magazine
Gagosian Magazine
Artnet News