Across the Synaptic Cleft: Matter and Mystery in the Sculpture of Adrienne Lee
March 4, 2026
By Richard Vine

In two works now on long-term loan at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, the young Korean-American artist Adrienne Lee (b. 1998) seeks to reconcile multiple contraries—thus evoking the mystery of their physical and conceptual interaction—in intricate sculptural form. Since these mid-sized steel pieces, Garden (2020) and Change of Heart (2021), evoke neurological structures and processes, they are themselves embodiments of the very conundrum they address. The hard-metal assemblages call to mind squishy biological matter that, infused with life (whatever that is), generates the phantoms of human feeling and thought. This theme also haunts Lee’s related sculptures Tell me where is fancy bred, Or in the heart or in the head? (2021), an airy bicameral head cage that visually echoes the neural webbing within the skull, and an untitled floor-work study made at the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina.

Garden, 2020, plasma-cut steel

Formally, Garden (2020) is the simpler of the two NIH works. Its ranks of jaggedly cut plates refer to the planar layering of arboreal cells in the brain. (Imagine Giacometti investigating not the human form but the internal neuro network that animates it.) Though the components stand no more than two feet high, their profusion does indeed call to mind the ordered density of a garden—a locale inseparable, in a Western cultural context, from Eden, the site of humanity’s original sin of consuming the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The notion that knowing too little and then suddenly knowing too much can be dangerous, and even inherently wrong, is the stuff of tragedy, from Oedipus Rex to Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury.

But so too is the loss of knowledge. This is clearly, painfully, reinforced by the fact that Lee’s sculptures sit in the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes. The cells these aesthetic shapes reference are vulnerable to trauma (“insult to the brain”) and to degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, and Alzheimer’s. Change of brain function grows most tragic when it causes a “change of heart,” i.e., gradual deadening of emotion and therefore of self—when patients no longer recognize their own friends, children, or spouses and so lose the feelings that have long motivated and defined them. One could well imagine the afflicted praying, like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night of his arrest and impending crucifixion, “let this cup pass from me”—even while knowing his destiny was sealed in advance.

Change of Heart itself is a more complicated work, combining cut steel forms with cast bronze pods, woven wire, and paper, to more closely approximate the appearance of the brain’s Purkinje cells. These structures, first captured in striking drawings by the Spanish Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal in 1888-89, feature a pot-shaped neuron with extensive upwardly branching dendrites (Lee’s soaring cut steel and wire). The cells stack up neatly in the cerebellum, in the manner replicated in Garden. In Change of Heart, the cloud-like swaths of white paper draped and threaded through the sculpture’s upper reaches recall the mental cloudiness that blossoms when brain cells deteriorate.

Change of Heart (변심), 2021, cast bronze, plasma-cut steel, Japanese ogura paper, aluminum wire

Detail of Change of Heart (변심), 2021

Healthy awareness versus cognitive fog is the most poignant of the contrasts conjured by these two sculptures, but there are many others: science vs. art, mineral vs. organic, tangible vs. intangible. Underlying them all is the irony that Lee explores the biological mystery of thought via a quasi-industrial method of fabrication. Her sculptures, though ultimately concerned with pure ideation, result from plasma cutting—a brute hands-on technique that entails a metal-shop setting, heavy protective gear, goggles, and torches that can dissolve steel at temperatures up to 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

That broad disparity between purpose and means parallels the most significant contrast of all, epitomized in what is called the “synaptic cleft.” Cajal was among the first researchers to realize that neurons are not continuously reticulated, but rather separated by minute spaces, across which they somehow “communicate” through “impulses.” (To a skeptic, this sounds like polite shorthand for “we don’t really know what happens.”) Today, neurophysiologists can detail the various electrochemical intermediaries that bridge those gaps, fostering some processes and inhibiting others. But the mystery of thinking itself—whatever the mechanisms of its birth, enrichment, diminishment, and death—remains unsolved. What is consciousness really? Why does it emerge in certain kinds of matter under certain circumstances, and never in other kinds of matter under any conditions? (As Aristotle observed, however many times you throw a stone into the air, it will never learn to fly.) Plato characterized learning as “a blaze kindled by a leaping spark,” and the metaphor still seems apt for the way signification—not molecules but meaning—flashes across the much larger synaptic cleft between two brains.

Just how does data—usually incrementally then suddenly—become information? How do a series of mouth noises, or certain marks on paper, abruptly attain the startling clarity of Wordsworth’s “A violet by a mossy stone / Half-hidden from the eye”—an image that can leap from one mind to another over immensities of distance and time?

Scientists can specify that a particular stimulus induces a particular biochemical response, but not how that response, occurring simultaneously with myriad others, gives rise to a state of awareness—be it fear or curiosity, understanding or desire. How does a physical process ever transform into an idea? How can a three-pound glob of cerebral tissue generate a pubescent girl’s diary entries, to say nothing of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason?

Historically, steel sculptors—Julio González, Eduardo Chillida, David Smith, Tony Smith, Richard Serra, Bernar Venet, Beverly Pepper, Mel Kendrick, Anila Quayyum Agha, Donald Lipski, Roxy Paine, et al.—tend to work large. Lee’s pieces would probably be even more impressive at monumental scale. Yet they are already exponentially larger than their real-life cellular subjects, and intellectually engaging beyond their modest physical scale.

Detail of Tell me where is fancy bred, Or in the heart or in the head? 2021

Lee, who was born to a diplomatic family in Korea, grew up all over the world, and studied both studio art and neuroscience in the U.S., seems to respond innately to the intrigue of contrasts and contraries. That impulse has led her to probe even metaphysical mysteries. In 2026 she installed an abstract painting, throw-rug fashion, on the floor of the Oratorio di Santa Chiarella in Assisi, Italy, the home of Saint Francis, venerated for his humility, and Saint Clare, who founded the monastic Order of Poor Ladies—a site where converse with the Divine has long been the focus of daily life.  

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Richard Vine is a former managing editor of Art in America and the author of several hundred critical articles and reviews. His books include the career survey Odd Nerdrum: Paintings, Sketches, and Drawings (2001) and the art-historical survey New China, New Art (2008), which traces the emergence of avant-garde art in post-Mao China. In 2016, he published the artworld crime novel SoHo Sins. Sculpting Empathy, his biographical study of the Chinese sculptor Liu Shiming, was released in March 2026 by Rutgers University Press. Vine has taught at the New School, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, New York University, and the University of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. In addition, he has lectured at museums and cultural institutions throughout the world, and curated exhibitions at the National Art Museum of China, the National Academy of Art in New Delhi, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, the AHL Foundation in New York, and the Central Art Museum in Hangzhou, China, as well as the commercial venues Studio Artego and Bienvenu Steinberg and J Gallery, both in New York, and Chillala House, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.