Carrier Bags of Power – Young Joo Lee

“The works in Carrier Bags of Power¹ were made after my daughter’s birth. Pregnancy and childbirth made me aware that each of us is shaped by a lineage: our mothers – their bodies, love, endurance, and struggles. Women’s bodies are carrier bags: vessels of life, memory, and care, not instruments of conquest.

Becoming a mother made me long for a different social order, one in which care is not private labor or moral virtue, but a principle of power. To move toward that possibility, I began dismantling the symbolism of spiritual and temporal authority: hierarchies embedded in religion, creation stories, and today’s politics, where a single figure stands above other living beings.

From there, I turned to societies organized differently from patriarchal models. Matrilineal and matrifocal communities have endured despite globalization, often a process of patriarchalization. They offer living examples of alternative structures: environmentally sustainable, gender-equal, and community-based, where women, children, and elders are valued.

Through these works, I propose a foundation for reimagining who holds power, and for building structures capable of sustaining a world organized around care.” – Young Joo Lee

¹ In reference to Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1986