Katya Lee is a conceptual artist and musician working at the intersection of sustainability, identity, and performance.
After a decade on the global music stage, she turned away from fame to focus on the handmade. Her work reclaims discarded materials—plastic, fast fashion, industrial waste—and turns them into artwear: sculptures worn on the body, created in small, non-replicable drops.
Artist Statement
In 2015 I moved to New York to begin again. I didn’t know the language. I didn’t know a single soul. I signed a lease. Paid upfront and woke up on top of a high-rise construction site. And then the city began to scream.
Every morning at 5am, the trucks would arrive. At 6am, the ground shook. I stopped sleeping. I stopped thinking. I started measuring sound with apps on my phone. The subway. The restaurants. The street.
The noise was relentless. And I realized: this isn’t a city. It’s a fight to survive. These jackets are created from that anxiety. From that helplessness. From those decibels that I couldn’t silence.
I made one covered in earplugs, hundreds of them—a soft armor. A refusal.
The track you hear was built from those recordings.
The machines. The drills. The screaming…the voice of an invisible man. I made him the frontman.
Because we don’t get to look away anymore.
