On shelves, in stacks, scattered
Jessica Wee
Opening April 23, 2026, 5 pm – 8 pm
McBride Contemporain presents On shelves, in stacks, scattered, a solo exhibition by Jessica Wee. In this new body of paintings, Wee revisits traditional Korean still-life through a contemporary surrealist lens, examining selfhood, migration, and the shifting notion of home.
This new body of work draws inspiration from the Munbangdo tradition, an 18th-century Korean screen painting style depicting shelves filled with books and precious objects within a flattened pictorial space. By recontextualizing objects from her own collection, such as books, storage boxes and fish-shaped plates, Wee transforms these items into an index of her lived experience: markers of migration, heritage, and the evolution of home across multiple apartments in Montreal, Paris, New York, and Korea.
Wee’s paintings operate within an art historical dialogue rooted in cross-cultural exchange, the Munbangdo tradition itself shaped by illusionistic techniques introduced by Jesuit missionaries into East Asia. Trained in the academic tradition at an atelier in Florence, Jessica Wee brings moments of illusionistic depth and rendered surface, while embracing the flattening and decorative patterning of Korean folk painting, or Minhwa, producing a hybrid visual language that shifts between illusion and abstraction.
A recurring motif throughout the exhibition is the hot pink Korean rubber glove, commonly associated with dishwashing and kimchi preparation. Reappearing across the paintings, it serves as both a formal and symbolic device: a flash of saturated colour, a compositional anchor, and a subtle reference to gendered domestic labour, care and endurance. Elsewhere, ghostly vessels and stacked books hover between familiarity and estrangement, imparting a dreamlike quality to the works. Wee builds these compositions through vibrant chromatic relationships that evoke specific places and memories, from the blue of Parisian doors to the mustard yellow of her grandaunt’s room.
On shelves, in stacks, scattered expands the still life tradition beyond its conventional role as a study of objects. Wee’s paintings act as repositories of personal and cultural memory, illuminating how objects bear histories across generations, borders, and domestic spaces. In her hands, arrangements are not only compositional strategies but also suggest that home is not anchored to a single place, but carried forward in the objects we choose to keep.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jessica Wee is a Korean American Canadian artist who grew up in Paris and Montreal. Wee’s work explores the experience of navigating life between cultures, crafting alternate worlds that connect the multifaceted layers of her identity. She weaves together personal experiences, art historical references and fantasy, with an underlying sense of mystery and playful disruption. Her paintings depict domestic scenes and quotidian moments featuring characters who appear to transform, multiply, or divide. These alter-egos exude a sense of mischief, independence and freedom, soaring through space or peering through windows as if slipping in from another dimension.
Jessica Wee is currently completing an MFA at Concordia University in Montreal and previously studied classical realist oil painting at the Angel Academy of Art in Florence, Italy. Her work has been exhibited at Kiaf SEOUL, Maison de la Culture NDG in Montreal, Steve Turner Gallery in Los Angeles, Latitude Gallery in New York, and Spring Break Art Show in New York, and has been featured in Hyperallergic and Artnet. In 2023, Artsy selected her work Déjeuner sur l’herbe to display across digital screens in the New York City subway system as part of a curated program highlighting artists through guest curators. That same year, Wee was an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center. Her work will be presented in the upcoming Pictura Triennale of Painting in Montreal, curated by eunice belidor in the Fall of 2026.
