About her various mixed-media works of recent years Hiroko Lee says, “My iconographic images have gone through several transformations, but many reflect nature… I see that everything…in nature is constantly being born and then disappearing.” Embodied within those natural images are several other potent influences from her past and her present.

Her involvement with art began twenty years ago as a way of coping with the death of her husband, Wei-Ning Lee. A high school student during World War II, Hiroko Lee describes her decision to leave Japan in the 1950s as a “rebellion.” However, after the death of her husband, amidst her grief she found herself nostalgic for her Japanese past. As a novice artist in the late 1980s she was inspired by classic Japanese woodblock prints, and particularly by the sinuous lines of kimono images, which continue to haunt some of her ambitious large scale polychrome prints as forms drifting through clouds or water, often in the company of another Japanese icon, the colorful carp.

From the beginning of her life as an artist, landscapes have occupied a central role in the evolution of her work, and forests are the dominant subject matter of her most recent prints. But the spirits that inhabit her recent black and white layered prints seem also to derive from the period of her most intense personal grief. “I did lots of foggy landscapey things.　I lost my husband and my father in the same year; they are beyond the clouds.　I wanted to show the barrier between the actual living reality and the other world.” Because her father was in　charge of a Buddhist temple and her grandfather was a priest at a Shinto shrine, Hiroko Lee is well aware of the unseen realms that parallel the visible world.

The layered prints ? an original print made from woodblock and its mirror image printed on loosely woven fabric ? suggest an animistic presence that is not present in　the initial design.　“I did not plan these strange images.　They just appeared,” she confesses modestly.　Deep inside her the ancient Japanese aesthetic of Mono no aware is alive and well ? a cultural pattern using motifs from nature to express illusive ideas and emotions, often defined in English as expressing the ‘Ah!-ness’ of human life.

“I am particularly fascinated by printmaking and its processes,” she wrote in 2005. My somewhat illusive images are always about movement. Beginning with a childlike, spontaneous approach, inspired by poetry and music, which are always within me, I pick up a physical rhythm that carries me beyond my expectations.”

William Thrasher, interview with Hiroko Lee, November, 2005 and Artist Statement.