Raina Lee’s artwork from tree-house studio to high-end galleries appealing
- 3 hours ago
To get to ceramist Raina Lee’s tree house, you enter through an iron gate with a dog warning sign and climb a long wooden staircase that creaks beneath your feet. You’ll then cross a suspension bridge, and you’ll hear, “Be careful, it’s very wobbly,” before seeing Lee, 48.
There, you’ll likely find her with a mug in hand, leaning against the door frame of her tree house and waiting for you to join her at a Japanese-style tea table. Her serene retreat feels like a cabin in a national park, yet it’s perched on a slope in Lee’s Mount Washington backyard, shaded by Brazilian pepper trees.
The studio is home to dozens of her ceramic works, available for viewing by appointment.
Lee’s pieces range from small tea bowls ($640) to large moon jars ($4,800), and her works can be found at high-end galleries such as Rhett Baruch in Hollywood and Verso in New York. For Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and other holidays, she has sales of smaller, more affordable wares. Every year, Lee’s family members get “Christmas ceramics” as gifts from her.
“I tried to give vases and cups to my aunt, but she doesn’t use them,” she says. “She put them on top of her fireplace to display. I’m like, ‘You know you can just use them. It’s not that valuable.’”
Modesty aside, Lee’s artistic journey began “by accident” in 2016 in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she was living next door to Choplet, a ceramics studio and gallery. That’s where she began making pottery. After switching to a 24-hour studio called Clay Space, Lee and friend Minh Singer spent countless night sessions together. “We would bicycle and somehow meet somewhere on the way, ‘Goonies’-style, and then ride over to the studio at night and stay until 4 a.m.,”
Singer says. “She was very experimental and funky at night, and at daytime, she would throw and do more technique.” Lee, a former journalist who covered the tech and gaming industries, says she found satisfaction in the way ceramics allowed her to create “tangible objects from start to finish.”
When she transitioned to ceramics full-time, her family thought she was “really crazy,” she says. Lee, the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, grew up in Rancho Palos Verdes. She says that art wasn’t a common pursuit in her family and that perhaps the closest thing she got to witness was her grandma’s occasional hobby of traditional Chinese painting. “But I think I’m old enough now where no one is questioning that kind of stuff,” Lee says.
“Maybe if I were 20, that would have happened. But now, it’s like nobody cares.” While living in New York, Lee joined a glaze-mixing class at Greenwich House Pottery, which sparked her interest in creating her own. After moving back to Los Angeles in 2017, Lee was able to expand her ceramics possibilities. She and her architect husband, Mark Watanabe, bought a house, which Watanabe remodeled along with the tree house. In her studio, Lee has placed her kilns and pottery wheel and tried alternative firing techniques such as raku and pit firing.
Having a home studio has made it easier for Lee to experiment with pottery glazes. She’s most proud of her volcanic glazes; they are applied before pottery pieces are fired in a kiln for four to 12 hours. The result? Unique crackly textures that are uneven to the touch, either bumpy or pitted, much like craters on the moon. Because her glazes are formulated with minerals, she jokingly says her works “end up looking like rocks again.”
“For example, when you look at oyster shells, they have an iridescence of pearly green and blue, and that’s definitely from minerals like copper,” she says. “I just find it interesting that it’s the same materials recombined into something else, because everything in the earth is sort of like one thing.” Nature is Lee’s main source of inspiration. When she’s not throwing clay on a wheel or hand-building clay pieces in her studio, she is in the wilderness around the country going on hikes and finding inspiration, which she posts about on Instagram, in addition to posts about her ceramics work and shows.
Ted Vadakan, a friend of 20 years, says Lee often takes reference photos along the way and uses her watercolor to paint what she saw and what inspires her at the end of each day of hiking. “She’s always observing things normal people don’t see,” says Vadakan. “She’ll be on the bluffs of the ocean and notice all the moss and lichen growing in different volcanic rock formations. I think all those textures and colors that she sees are very apparent in her works.”
Lee’s experimentation with sculptural glazes and alternative firing techniques has gained the attention of art dealers and curators such as Claire Vinson and Philip Williams of Stroll Garden, a Los Angeles-based gallery for contemporary ceramics and sculpture, particularly works by female artists. Vinson and Williams featured Lee’s work in their inaugural exhibition in 2021, and they will host her new show next month. The exhibition, which opens Nov. 9, will feature works inspired by Lee’s summer studio residency and gallery visits in Paris.
“She seems to know everybody,” says Vinson, adding that Lee’s solo show brought a variety of new faces to the gallery. “She’s so well connected and engaged with the ceramics world and the art world in L.A.
“Raina has an openness to her that I think is really central to how her work evolves over time,” Vinson adds. “She’s not afraid of results that might seem weird or unintentional or look like mistakes. She takes it all in stride.”
At “Calibration,” a group exhibition in June at the LaiSun Keane gallery in Boston, Lee presented four 3D-printed pieces: three Chun meiping vases, which were popular forms during China’s Song dynasty, and one “Tetris”-inspired piece of cong pottery, based on a Chinese Bronze Age form.
Having grown up in a house with traditional Chinese furniture and decor, Lee says she’s exceedingly intrigued by ceramics from the Song dynasty (960-1279).
“A lot of the best glaze innovations were during the Song dynasty, which was a thousand years ago,” she says. “I was trying to re-create different Song dynasty glazes, and I’ve been able to make similar ones. So I’m interested in exploring that as a way for me to personally time-travel and understand what that history was like.”
Tribune News Service