SE Cooper Contemporary and Converge 45 are pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by the artist Rob Rhee. Rhee has cultivated a sculptural practice that unfolds in rhythm with the agricultural calendar. Rather than producing objects on the timetable of exhibitions, his work follows seasons of planting, tending, harvesting, curing, and a return. In my hands were waving as if my feet, Rhee extends a long engagement with cultivated gourds into a body of new sculptures that considers how materials, gestures, and forms are carried across generations.

The exhibition reflects on cycles that operate simultaneously at vastly different scales: the annual return of seasons, the deep time of domesticated plants, inherited cultural memory, and the slow accumulation of an artistic practice. Gourds, which are among humanity's earliest cultivated plants have been shaped through thousands of years of selective cultivation, they exemplify relationships between human

name (latin) for rock 7 scanLopez Island Library, July 2026

Working between studio and farm, Rhee sculpture implies a practice of propagating, a handoff from one generation to the next rather than an invention.  Recalling Korean lineage, diasporic experience, and agricultural knowledge become intertwined, not as fixed identities in the work but as living processes continually transformed through repetition and return.

Many of the works emerge from systems of cultivation that honor continuity over extraction. For these works, Rhee employs JADAM, a Korean natural farming practice centered on the fermentation of spent plants and the living microbial cultures being transferred to the next year’s crop through foliar application. While this method reduces reliance on industrial agricultural inputs, its significance within the exhibition lies less in sustainability as an endpoint than in fermentation as a model for memory work. By passing something living from one generation to the next. A backslopping logic is introduced, where each new culture inherits part of the last, this material analogue for artistic practice itself, becomes a type of historical materialism in the work. 

A large-scale wall sculpture almost recalls the structure of a frieze, allowing ancient forms of collective labor in being carried by a procession. Embodying the Ergastines creation of the Peplos in the form of harvested gourds the harvest labor is preserved as the record of months of growth, environmental conditions and human intervention as sculptural event.

Rather than advancing a singular argument, my hands were waving as if my feet, imagines labor and production not simply as the manufacturing of objects, but as participation in larger cycles that shape landscapes, communities, and ways of living. Through repeated acts of agriculture, and sculpture Rhee proposes making as an ongoing conversation between past and future—one in which every gesture carries traces of those that came before and possibilities for those still to come. Here, sculpture is neither fixed nor autonomous, but something continuously inherited, transformed, and returned to.

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Rob Rhee is an artist, writer and an Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary Visual Art program at the University of Washington. His work has been exhibited in the Pacific Northwest at the Portland Art Museum, the Frye Art Museum, the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Hedreen Gallery, and the Sarah Spurgeon Gallery at Central Washington University. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally at the Hunterdon Art Museum, White Columns, the Fort Worth Contemporary Gallery and the Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles, as well as in the 10th Berlin Biennale, the 2011 Changwon Biennale, and at the Ilmin Museum of Art, in Seoul, South Korea. In 2018 he was awarded the Korea Arts Foundation of America Award for Visual Art and was nominated for a Stranger Genius award in 2016. His blog, Tabletop, was Short-Listed for an Arts Writers Grant by Creative Capital / the Andy Warhol Foundation and his critical writing on art has been published in Art in America, Art Asia Pacific, Arcade, Columbia: A Journal of Arts and Letters, and La Norda.

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This exhibition is part of the 2026 Converge 45 citywide triennial entitled Here, To you, Now. Curated by Lumi Tan, this iteration of the triennial opens August 27, 2026 with a weekend of receptions, performances, screenings, and talks at 16 venues throughout Portland. Inspired by the writing of Portland literary icon Ursula K. Le Guin, the triennial features 28 artists and 17 new commissions that activate the city as a shared stage for discovery, dialogue, and connection.

intention and biological agency, reminding us that making is always a process shared across lives, environments, and time.