For The Many with Yen Ha

New York-based architect and visual artist Yen Ha is often asked how she connects her two modes of creative practice. In a lecture at Rice University, Ha deftly drew the audience into her work as she crafted an answer-in-progress. By showing images of “Invisible Gate”, an outdoor art gallery located in Poland that she worked on as one of three firms that tackled the project independently over 10 years, and “Mailed Art”, a series of handmade postcards sent during New York City’s 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, Ha offered that the link between these practices is her desire to forge connections with people she will likely never meet.

Ha’s embrace of chance encounters and indeterminacy circles back to something one of her favorite professors, Arthur Lubetz, once said. According to Ha, Lubetz believed “Architecture should be incomplete.” Ha takes that idea one step further and suggests that it’s people who complete her architecture and her art.