Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude

“Each time I start a work, I think about it as choreographing a unique universe shaped by the possibilities of that moment,” Taiwanese artist and filmmaker Val Lee says.

Hovering between worlds, Lee’s practice straddles cinema and performance, the visible and the imagined, the intimate and the collective. At the Hayward Gallery’s HENI Project Space, she presents The Presence of Solitude, her first solo exhibition in the UK. Now open and on view until 11 January 2026, the show, curated by Yung Ma, Senior Curator of the Hayward Gallery, brings together film, photography, and costume in a meditation on isolation and the strange intimacy it can produce.

For over a decade, Lee has been crafting disorienting environments and moments that ask viewers to reframe their perception of space and time. Born in Taipei in 1981, she trained in Filmmaking and Sociology at SUNY before founding the art collective Ghost Mountain Ghost Shovel in 2008. Lee’s work, which has been shown from the Gwangju Biennale to the Grand Palais, always returns to one recurring condition: solitude.

“I am especially attentive to places that feel wholly unfamiliar,” she tells me when we speak about her film Valley in the Minibus. “When I arrive in a new city, I often remain inside for days, delaying any encounter with the outside. I remember, when I was taking the Trans-Siberian Railway from Vladivostok to Moscow, I repeatedly practiced walking straight from the hotel to the station.”

These so-called “non-places”, she explains, reveal what is usually hidden. Airports, train stations, motorways, spaces of passage and anonymity, become mirrors for the self. “A much-liked curator friend once told me she feels most relaxed in airports where no one knows her; for me, those thresholds make me feel most acutely present.”

Lee recalls a winter in Aomori, Japan, where she lived alone in a Tadao Ando building designed for twenty artists. “Each wardrobe was exactly the same, the kitchens the same, the mirrors the same. Even the bathing areas, though in different numbers, were repeated with a kind of absolute sameness. My room was long and narrow, ending in a vast sheet of glass that opened onto a silent view of snow. In that repetition and in that frame of stillness, I became both just another artist and myself, and the solitude was not heavy but strangely calm. Perhaps, for someone who values uniqueness, to dissolve into pure ordinariness can be its own quiet form of beauty.”

Another recurring thread in her work is the use of masks and costumes. “Costumes and masks can be seen as a unique exterior, designed for oneself – over time, the surfaces settle into textures and shades that feel utterly fitting.” Three of these haunting, long-haired costumes appear in The Presence of Solitude, displayed alongside film and projection, their facelessness both a protection and an invitation.

Solitude, for Lee, is not withdrawal but a condition of awareness. “This year, at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, we made a work titled Stereoblind. Many performers moved through the crowd, each absorbed in different actions. Among them was a female in a ski helmet, listening to music, untouched by the crowd. Later she lay back on an inflatable bed, reading comics. That solitude seemed like the kind almost everyone has known at some point in their young ages.

For me, solitude now feels closer to Valley in the Minibus: a condition built to one’s own measure, carried alone into the mountains with a few companions – still strangers, yet strangely trustworthy. Solitude becomes something to be carefully maintained, precise and fragile, almost like the presence of a bonsai.”

When I ask about her creative process, Lee describes a rhythm that oscillates between immersion and retreat. “My daily life depends on whether I am filming, rehearsing, editing, colour grading, or just thinking. Recently, for example, I was in Bromo, riding horses with the team and photographer to film at the crater. At other times I might be in a dark room with the colourist, discussing how many straight lines the mirror’s reflection would form. Or days of going out to rehearse with performers for hours – laughing, talking, and sharing our lives in between. Of course, there are also many times when I simply read alone and write a few notes. In general, it is an alternation between intense contact with people and solitary work. No one can always have someone by their side, so working alone has always felt like the most ordinary thing.”

“It feels like carrying a small fragment of solitude inside the pocket while walking in the crowd,” she says of bringing her work to London. The Hayward’s brutalist architecture, she adds, shaped her vision for the show: “The building does have a very strong presence – it almost feels immovable, like a landscape in itself. I didn’t want to compete with that weight, but rather, under those strong lines, to create a kind of presence like a cave… I hope audiences might find, within solitude, new angles to be sculpted, as if contours emerge from the quiet.”

Before we end, I ask about her favourite spaces in Taipei. “I like nos:books, a publisher and bookstore founded by two painters. They turn books into curious new inventions. Pawnshop is my favourite queer dance club – it has a strong sense of design without ever feeling too pretentious. I also went to YCDG Café with Yung Ma, the curator of the Hayward Gallery. It’s located in Taipei’s red-light district, a midnight café tucked into a rather chaotic area.”

Then, a final note on what she’s reading: “I really love this as a wrap-up question. I am now reading The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.”



Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude is on view until 11 Jan 2026 at HENI Project Space, Hayward Gallery.



Feature image: The Sorrowful Football Team (2025). Courtesy the artist.