“I looked her in the face and I said ‘black lives matter is like the modern KKK where white liberals go on the streets and use a black identity to push a liberal agenda.”
Conservatives have entirely ceded the realm of art to the leftists in America. From the academic institutions that teach art, to the schools that teach the artists and teachers who go on to teach art, to the museums, the granting organizations, the theater companies, poetry magazines, and development opportunities, nearly every avenue of arts creation has been reconstructed in the image of the left.
During my time in graduate school, this change was made fully and intentionally. What began as a course of study focused on beautiful writing, aesthetics, character development, story, and truth, morphed into activism. By the time I earned my degree in 2007, art activism was not a side story to artistic undertaking, it was the main focus. Often, I heard the phrase "if you're not doing activism with your work, what are you doing?" My work was not activist, in fact, activism in art is what is commonly known as propaganda, but this what has become of the arts in America.
This is precisely what Arthur Kwon Lee, a painter, a conservative, a Christian, discovered as he began to make real headway in the heady arts scene of New York City. He had a studio in Brooklyn, he had an art dealer, and he showed regularly at galleries featuring young artists on the rise. But after he had dinner with his dealer and expressed a dismissive attitude about Black Lives Matter, his career came to a crashing halt.
I met up with Lee at his studio, and he told me the story of how he ended up on the outside after being something of a New York art scene darling–something every artist wants to be. Lee is an imposing figure. He's tall, with a cut jawline, broad shoulders, and an obvious depth and strength of character.
Arthur Kwon Lee, Instagram
"I worry about the West, I really do," he told me. "I think it's just part of being a Christian, frankly, you have to care about these things. And I think that's a big reason why I got kicked out. Because I couldn't join in the collapse, it felt hypocritical."
His mother is a composer of classical music, his father a pastor. Lee feels like he's a "visual fusion" of them, "trying to explore the symbolic and the religious through the visual." He studied art at George Washington University, which he said was a "super woke program."
"It was all very much theory, and intersectionality, so I learned very quickly, 'if I'm going to survive in this field, I need to learn social camouflage.' I learned that very early, because all the arts infrastructure has been basically dominated by the left." In part, this is because they don't have facts on their side, Lee said, so instead they indoctrinate.
"They have to go into the culture and disseminate that way."
He moved to New York in 2016 to live the starving artist dream, but he started getting solo shows right away, a big win in an art world where group shows are the norm for up-and-comers. The galleries were small, but the shows were all his, and he was rising fast.
He earned residencies and grants, Noah Becker's White Hot Magazine was covering his shows. Lee was attending fashionable art scene parties at the Jane Hotel and he showed at Miami's Art Basel right next to the hit of that season, Maurizio Cattelan banana taped to a wall, titled Comedian.
Then within 6 months, all his galleries ghosted.
The visual art world, so long based on money, power, and influence, had drunk the progressive Kool-Aid. Once Lee made his views known, he fell suddenly out of fashion. His views hadn't really come up, galleries assumed that since he was a painter, a minority, and had all the bonafides, he was ideologically "part of the tribe."
This despite the fact that Lee's subject matter is traditional, he paints Christian imagery. He is drawn to biblical stories, Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel, Adam and Eve, these are the narratives that draw his brush to canvas. When he spoke to galleries and dealers about his work, he spoke from the heart, and that, he said, is when he "started to rub people the wrong way."
"I've never been married, but it's like a divorce," Lee said, "because the galleries, you're working with them intimately. It was like death by a thousand cuts." Lee was hanging out with Gavin McInnes and Andrew Klavan, who are into art, and photos of them together began to circulate in the art world, which is shockingly small. It was at this point that Lee said Antifa began to vandalize his studio, where he also threw parties for his conservative friends. Lee and I knew many of the same people, even though our art world experiences were in different disciplines, and years apart.
The art social scene is intimately linked to the professional, and Lee said "there are basically four places young artists need to be seen throughout the week." Lee was making his appearance at the Norwood Club on Thursdays, the Jane on Tuesdays. And word started to get out that he was MAGA, Christian, and against the ideology behind BLM.
"Saying that you're a right leaning, freedom loving person is now counter-culture, and the dominant culture won't have it. It's essentially a Satanic immersion, going into the art world," Lee said.
"At the time, they were really big on black power art, y'know, and I don't mean like empowering the black community. I mean like Black Lives Matter, Rainbow Coalition." Lee explained his view that ideologically-based art was propaganda, a perspective he and I share.
"When political ideology stains a gallery, it's going to become an arm of propaganda," Lee said. Galleries, however, were all in. And so were the financial and business leaders who attended the parties, courting young artists, congregating with the left-leaning talent. Lee tried to play along, but he wouldn't betray himself, his religion or his values.
"I was still playing at social camouflage," he said, seeing how interlinked the money, power and ideology had all become. "I was thinking about my financial security."
"The real goal is your honor and integrity. That's always my thing. I could have just kept my mouth shut. Literally, 'ust don't talk.' Maybe I'm a loudmouth. I could have literally just been like, 'Arthur shut the f*ck up. Don't talk and just keep getting money,'" he said.
"But how can you say you're an artist when you're like, a part of the dominant narrative? I think it doesn't make sense. Like, for me, it's like, if you're a creative person, and you're not creating it's like you're not, like, breathing right? You know what I mean?" I knew exactly what he meant.
"If you're like an actual artists in a counterculture you're gonna speak up, you have to," Lee said.
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It was right about then that Lee ended up at dinner with the galleries for Hunter Biden, Georges Berges, "the guy that's currently laundering money for Hunter Biden," he said.
"Georges was taking me for sushi, and vetting me. His artists do well, they regularly get sales," he said, "I often think about how I walked away from money, in a way."
It all seemed to come to a head when he was asked to participate in a show about the latest minority-based craze of the time, "stop Asian hate."
"I was in New York with one gallery in Union Square and they wanted to do this 'stop Asian hate' thing because I'm Asian, I guess. 'Stop Asian hate' marches were happening, and there was this one gallery owner, we were in a pizza shop, woodfired pizza place, and they pushed all these tables together. And so I'm sitting there, with a couple of artists, one black artist, and she's like 'I had this great idea we should do like, stop Asian hate and black lives matter. We should do an artist with you two doing the show together.
"And I was just like, kind of fed up at that point. And it had nothing to do with bravery or courage. She's like, What do you think of that? And I looked her in the face and I said 'black lives matter is like the modern KKK where white liberals go on the streets and use a black identity to push a liberal agenda.'" He knew instantly he had burned a bridge and there was no going back.
The table got really quiet. And then when the conversation picked up, the group stopped talking to Lee altogether. At the end of the meal, the gallerist asked for a meeting at his studio. When she arrived for the meeting, she brought a U-Haul truck, and all of his paintings that the gallery had were unloaded into his studio. The meeting was the ending of the relationship.
The rest of the galleries he was affiliated with followed suit. Lee didn't know who his collectors were, who had been buying his work–that's all proprietary information to the gallery. And now, he's on his own, rebuilding, painting, and selling his work on his own.
'Big Tech,' Arthur Kwon Lee
But what was an ending for him he sees as an opportunity for conservatives and artists who refuse to play the social camouflage game.
"It's an opportunity," he said, showing me his work. "There's this aesthetic of people on the right that are dorky, boring, suits and bow ties. But there's like this new this new young right. It's like, a lot of the guys are jacked. We like to fight each other. We make crazy art. We smoke cigars. We throw parties."
The time is ripe for a conservative, counter-cultural art scene that uplifts individual freedom, embraces liberty and self-expression, and draws on traditional values and narratives. Lee is ready to lead the charge. Perhaps with a little funding, exposure, new collectors and the kind of moxie artists used to have to burn, conservatives can make a play for the American culture the left has totally monopolized.
