AHN LEE: SILKWORM 緣份: My dream is a future with you

AHN LEE

SILKWORM 緣份: My dream is a future with you

February 7 - February 28, 2026

A Pop-Up Exhibition on View at

Minnesota Street Project

San Francisco, CA

Morgann Trumbull Projects is proud to announce our newest exhibition, SILKWORM 緣份: My dream is a future with you, a multimedia exhibition by Ahn Lee. The exhibition will be on view from February 7 to February 28, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, February 7 from 5:00-7:00pm, coinciding with First Saturday at Minnesota Street Project.

Ahn Lee is a queer Cantonese-American artist, self-taught ceramicist, and researcher. As a person of Sunwui (Xinhui) descent, Lee’s interdisciplinary practice is a combined methodology of autobiographical re-making and archival research on the Cantonese diaspora. In SILKWORM 緣份: My dream is a future with you, Lee cites the concept of yuán fèn (緣份), the notion of fate tying you to someone or something. Lee’s sustained engagement with the silkworm, which forms the conceptual foundation of the exhibition, emerged from a convergence of personal, academic, and global circumstances. The artist first developed an interest in silkworms while pursuing their MFA studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2020. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a personal experience with loss, and an encounter with the publication, Animacies by Mel Y. Chen, spurred Lee’s interest in the concept of bodily reincarnation, particularly as it relates to gender and queer theory. Within this layered context, the silkworm becomes a conduit through which Lee examines transformation and the histories of the Cantonese diaspora through the lens of the global silk trade.

Lee’s practice is deeply informed by their academic training, bringing a conceptual rigor and analytical precision to their artistic explorations. Their work unfolds through a process of full immersion, where research and creativity intersect, allowing conceptual inquiry to shape and guide the material outcomes. Humans treasure silk as a luxury fabric, but few consider the source of this coveted resource. Silk is a natural textile harvested exclusively from silkworms in a process that, commercially, leads to the demise of the very beings that make the existence of silk possible. For the past five years, Lee has raised the domesticated silkworm breed, bombyx mori, from egg to moth—feeding them a steady diet of mulberry leaves, boiling their cocoons to harvest their silk, and learning to weave with the thread of their labor. In contrast to commercial processes, Lee takes care to free the silk moths from their cocoons before boiling the cocoons to collect the silk.

Due to thousands of years of selective breeding and genetic modification, bombyx mori silkworms today are fully domesticated and exist solely for the purpose of human consumption. Lee rejects this narrow definition of the silkworm as a domesticized laboring body and seeks to reclaim its spiritual heritage, which has roots in ancient Chinese folklore and philosophy. Legend holds that silk was discovered when a silkworm cocoon fell into the tea of an empress, unraveling into a beautiful, shimmering thread. In Chinese tradition, silkworms are regarded as divine or sacred beings, creatures who possess the unique capability to convert organic matter into luminous thread. The lifecycle of the silkworm, marked by metamorphosis from larva to moth, became a powerful metaphor for transformation, rebirth, and renewal.

Lee’s work demands careful consideration not only for its representative histories and layered meanings, but also for the meticulous processes through which it is produced. The ceramic works presented in SILKWORM 緣份: My dream is a future with you are finished with crystalline glazes, for which the artist developed original recipes through extensive research and sustained experimentation, underscoring a practice grounded in material knowledge and technical precision. Crystalline glazes trace their origins to China and are distinguished by the formation of pronounced crystal structures that emerge within the glaze during the firing process. These crystalline patterns grow unpredictably inside the kiln, rendering each ceramic work one of a kind. Lee also finishes their ceramic works in gold luster, which has significance in Chinese culture, symbolizing luck, wealth, and prosperity.

Diverging from earlier iterations of their ceramic silkworms, Lee’s current body of works are realized in porcelain rather than stoneware. This shift in material introduces both technical challenges and possibilities. Porcelain’s fragility and susceptibility to cracking demanded the development of a new mode of labor, in which each silkworm is constructed as a solid form and subsequently hollowed, departing from conventional coil-building techniques. At the same time, porcelain’s historical associations with Chinese ceramic traditions and its capacity to reveal the nuances of crystalline glazes offer a material resonance that deepens both the visual and cultural dimensions of the work.

In addition to ceramic works, SILKWORM 緣份: My dream is a future with you presents five ink drawings on mulberry paper, offering visual insight into Lee’s imaginings of the silkworm as a spiritual entity. Executed through an intuitive, stream-of-consciousness approach without preparatory sketches, these ink drawings embrace the medium’s permanence and immediacy. Complementing these works is a concave mirror modeled after a traditional Taoist Bagua mirror, a powerful object in feng shui practice. While conventional Bagua mirrors feature convex surfaces intended to repel negative energy and are typically displayed outside doorways, Lee’s concave mirror invites the collection of positive energy within the exhibition space. Lee fashioned the concave mirror from porcelain and finished it in a mirror glaze. The mirror is mounted on a ceramic frame adorned with preserved silkworm moths raised by the artist, further intertwining personal narrative, cultural symbolism, and material practice.

Previously, Ahn Lee studied at UCLA as a Eugene V. Cota Robles PhD Graduate Fellow. Lee is a 2022 MFA graduate of the UC Berkeley Art Practice Department. Lee is the 2021 Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Award Winner, 2022 Watershed Ceramics Zenobia Fellow, and 2022-23 Headlands Center for the Arts Graduate Fellow. In 2024, Lee was a resident at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, an artist in California Clay at Bedford Gallery, and 2024 finalist for the SFMOMA SECA Award.

SILKWORM 緣份: My dream is a future with you will be on view at Morgan Trumbull Project’s pop-up location at Minnesota Street Project from February 7 to February 28, 2026. The gallery will be open on Tuesdays through Saturdays from 12:00 to 5:00pm, and by appointment. For inquiries, please email info@morganntrumbull.com or call 650-257-0485.