Photobook Library

Photographers

Photographer

Tim Lee

Biography

Tim Lee (b. 1975, Canada) is a Canadian artist known for his conceptually driven photographic and video works that explore the intersections of art history, performance, and personal identity. His practice often involves reenactments and staged scenarios referencing cultural and artistic moments.

Lee frequently places himself within historical or imagined contexts, using photography as a medium to question authorship, originality, and the construction of meaning. His work bridges photography, performance, and conceptual art.

His projects have been exhibited internationally and are held in major public collections. For collectors, Lee’s work is valued for its intellectual depth, its engagement with art history, and its distinctive approach to photographic authorship.

Photobook Library editorial summary · AI-assisted Independent summary

Photobooks

1 photobooks

Selected Works & Key Projects

A source-backed introduction to individual photographs and significant bodies of work.

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Key projects

Project · 2008

Passengers: 1.5 Tim Lee

Passengers: 1.5 Tim Lee brought together works developed through Lee’s research into an unusual San Francisco coincidence: Steve Martin and Neil Young each made consequential live recordings there in the late 1970s. Rather than present biography as fact, the exhibition used photographs, video, sound, vinyl, and the elevator as a setting to create an invented third history between comedy, rock, and bluegrass. Martin’s performance persona and Young’s shifting musical identities became material for Lee’s flips, loops, shadows, and reenactments. The project merits selection because it expands his photographic concerns into an exhibition-scale system, showing how place, genre, and media shape the public life of a name.

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Project · 2007

Remakes, Variations (1741–2049)

Remakes, Variations (1741–2049) was a 2007 exhibition of new work that organized Lee’s practice around remaking works that are themselves remakes. Its paired bodies of photography, video, and sculpture moved between classical music and slapstick comedy, with references ranging from J. S. Bach and Glenn Gould to Peter Sellers and Steve Martin. By inserting himself into loose reconstructions rather than producing exact replicas, Lee turned cultural inheritance into a chain of revisions extending from the historical past toward an imagined future. The project merits selection because it clearly states the larger structure of his practice: formal repetition and variation used to bring art history, popular culture, humour, and social context into contact.

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Project · 2013

Tim Lee: In Focus

For Asia Society’s 2013 In Focus commission, Lee created Blowin’ in the Wind, Bob Dylan, 1963 as an interactive multimedia installation functioning as a karaoke room. Visitors were invited to sing Dylan’s folk song to Lee’s guitar cover, shifting the work from solitary reenactment to a situation completed by other bodies and voices. The project extends Lee’s long-standing interest in how a celebrated performer’s public identity is repeatedly reproduced, while making participation central to the work’s meaning. It merits selection because it translates his strategies of cover, role-play, and mediation beyond the photograph into a social encounter, where each participant tests the song’s meaning against personal experience.

View source ↗

Selected photographs

2005

Untitled (Steve Martin, 1972)

In this life-size photographic self-portrait, Tim Lee rehearses Steve Martin’s early banjo-playing, arrow-through-the-head persona before a mirror. The image deliberately defeats the mirror’s expected correction: although Lee is right-handed, the banjo remains reversed through successive reflections and photographic flipping. That small perceptual error turns comic impersonation into a study of how a public identity is manufactured, remembered, and misread. Selected from Lee’s many pop-cultural reenactments, it is an especially concise example of his use of his own body, formal reversal, humour, and racialized questions of performance to unsettle a familiar celebrity image.

Work source ↗
© Tim Lee

2006

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Public Enemy

This photograph records Lee’s attempt to lie completely still on his studio floor for the running time of Public Enemy’s 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. The apparently spare image is the residue of an endurance performance: Lee adapts the floor-and-body configurations of Bruce Nauman’s late-1960s actions while using a politically charged hip-hop record as its temporal score. Its significance lies in making two distinct histories—conceptual performance and sampled rap—meet through the artist’s body. It merits selection because it makes Lee’s characteristic appropriation physical rather than merely referential, linking duration, listening, race, and photographic documentation.

Work source ↗

2004

The Jerk, The Opti-Grab, 1979

The Jerk, The Opti-Grab, 1979 draws on the defective eyeglass device in Carl Reiner’s 1979 film The Jerk, starring Steve Martin. In Lee’s chromogenic print, his glasses are subjected to the film’s absurd optical invention, extending a related group of works in which he assumes Martin-derived roles and poses. The photographic achievement is not faithful reconstruction but the conversion of a screen gag into a tangible visual disturbance: comic props become tools for testing vision and recognition. It merits selection as an early, sharply focused instance of Lee’s method of using slapstick to connect popular cinema with the unstable mechanics of photographic looking.

Work source ↗

2002

Untitled (No. 4)

Untitled (No. 4) is a two-part work made from two large chromogenic color prints. Its paired image of a body flying through space brings together a sports memory—Bobby Orr’s celebrated airborne hockey goal—and Bruce Nauman’s 1966 studio action Failing to Levitate in the Studio. Rather than simply quote either source, Lee uses the diptych to hold athletic spectacle and staged artistic action in productive tension. The work is a key early example of his photographic reenactments, in which a recognizable cultural image is redirected through his own body. Its selection is further substantiated by MoMA’s acquisition and inclusion in its 2005 New Work/New Acquisitions exhibition.

Work source ↗

Career timeline

7
  1. 1999

    Education

    BA Design, University of Alberta

    Lee completed a BA in Design at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

    Source: Lisson Gallery Verified Sep 3, 2026

  2. 2002

    Education

    MFA, University of British Columbia

    Lee completed an MFA at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

    Source: Lisson Gallery Verified Sep 3, 2026

  3. 2007

    Exhibition

    Remakes, Variations (1741–2049)

    Solo exhibition at Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver and Illingworth Kerr Gallery in Calgary.

    Source: Lisson Gallery Verified Sep 3, 2026

  4. January 8–February 2, 2008
  5. 2008

    Award

    Sobey Art Prize

    Lee received the Sobey Art Prize at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax.

    Source: Lisson Gallery Verified Sep 3, 2026

  6. 2009
  7. July 2015

Collections & representation

Representation

Lisson Gallery, Los Angeles

Western Front’s artist archive states that Lee is represented by Lisson Gallery, Los Angeles.

Verified 2026-09-03Western Front

Collection

Museum of Modern Art

MoMA lists Untitled (No. 4) as an online work by Lee and identifies one work online in his record.

Verified 2026-09-03Museum of Modern Art

Collection

KADIST

KADIST lists Untitled (Stanley Kubrick, 1945) under Lee’s collection artworks.

Verified 2026-09-03KADIST

Collection

Zabludowicz Collection

The Zabludowicz Collection’s artist record presents Lee’s works It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Public Enemy and Fear of a Black Planet, Public Enemy.

Verified 2026-09-03Zabludowicz Collection

Collection

National Gallery of Canada

Lee’s CV lists the National Gallery of Canada among collections holding his work.

Verified 2026-09-03Lisson Gallery

Collection

Tate Modern

Lee’s CV lists Tate Modern among collections holding his work.

Verified 2026-09-03Lisson Gallery

Archive

Western Front

Western Front maintains an artist archive record for Lee and lists the 2001 event The Move among related events.

Verified 2026-09-03Western Front

Articles & news

4

Other · Van Abbemuseum Library · Toby Kamps; Tim Lee

Tim Lee (opens a new site)

Library record for the 2008 Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Perspectives 161 catalogue, credited to Toby Kamps and Tim Lee; the 12-page publication includes a work list, biography, and bibliography.

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Based on shared publishers in this library—not a popularity ranking.

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