Home Artist Programs Supported Artists Rob Rhee

Rob Rhee

Seattle, Washington

Three clear glass, organically shaped vessels are displayed in a wooden case. The leftmost is roughly half-moon shaped and is filled with amber brown liquid. The central vessel is a lopsided oval filled with pale yellow liquid, and the rightmost has two bulbs, one over the other like connected blobs in a lava lamp. The third vessel is empty, and the other two have white stoppers.

Gist Translation: Findings, all senses, and the one about components made from scrap, not scratch

2025

Rounded and rippling fragments of tan-colored gourds are arranged in a roughly triangular form against a loose grid made by wood dowels in this sculptural piece. Short wooden pins poke out of the surfaces of the fragments at irregular intervals.

Untitled (Projection)

2025

Gourds are arranged in or on two wood cases displayed like shadow boxes. One of the gourds grows around a small glass bottle, and two others are stapled along their surfaces. Others have markings or lines incised or scarred onto the skin.

Gist Translation: Wine boxes, me, in a storage locker at the Fisherman’s Terminal filled with images and the same age

2025

Shards of gourds are arranged in a roughly tall, gourd-like shape and displayed against a white wall. The fragments range from cool peach tones to warm sage green and light tan, and wooden pins bristle across the surfaces.

Untitled (Sledge)

2025

Artworks shown are selected from works submitted by the artist in their grant or residency application. All works are copyright of the artist or artist’s estate.

About Rob Rhee

Rob is of Korean descent and has ear-length, straight black hair. He looks out and smiles at us, wearing a light blue sweater jacket over a copper-brown button-down shirt. He poses in front of a pile of darkened gourds, which are out of focus on a shelf behind.

Rob Rhee is an artist, writer, and Associate Professor and Chair of the 3D4M program at the University of Washington in Seattle. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Hunterdon Art Museum, White Columns, the Fort Worth Contemporary Gallery, the Portland Art Museum, the Frye Art Museum, the Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles, and the Ilmin Museum of Art, in Seoul, South Korea. Rhee also exhibited in the 10th Berlin Biennale and the 2011 Changwon Biennale. In 2018, he was awarded the Korea Arts Foundation of America Award for Visual Art. His blog, Tabletop, was Short-Listed for an Arts Writers Grant by Creative Capital / the Andy Warhol Foundation and his critical writing on art has been published in Art in America, Art Asia Pacific, Arcade, Columbia: A Journal of Arts and Letters, and La Norda.

Program Participation

Joan Mitchell Fellowship, 2026

Website / Social Links

“ As someone who came to sculpture through writing, I tend to move back and forth between the two, finding inspiration in cyclical processes of return. My decade-long relationship with gourds—in the studio and on the farm—follows these rhythms along different scales of influence and time. My work is the activity of cultivation, grafting, building soil, and other forms of agrarian bricolage—an ongoing conversation between past and future.”