Ileana Lee thinks of her place in the world as material, a belief reinforced by her residence in a number of cities in the Philippines and the United States. As such, her works give shape and appearance to the occasion of contact between agentive and volatile matter, as though to signal the language of a migrant or one who is always on the move, perceptive to change and reluctant to settle.
I. Lee holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Editorial Design from the University of the Philippines (1974) and a Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking from Ohio State University (1986). In the period between her studies, I. Lee actively exhibited graphic work in Manila with fellow members of the Philippine Association of Printmakers (PAP). The substances that are so closely set in her large format prints were, compared to those of her peers in the studio, non-representational and often made from etched lines and shadings in the artist’s favoured technique of intaglio on paper. At the same time, she forayed into assemblage using material found in her environment such as bamboo, wood, twigs and rocks, a practice jointly affected by her close affiliation to the conceptual group Shop 6 and her pupilage to the group’s leader Roberto Chabet (1937–2013).

Ever in touch with the elements and their cyclical character, I. Lee is prone to repeat. Rather than bringing works of art to an end, she chooses to present them over and over, such as in Bamboo Swing/Pond (1984, 1985, 1989 and 2013). Her preference for the series also comes out in her masking tape installations (1977, 1979, 1980 and 1986), which saw iterations in the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), the Museum of Philippine Art, Fukuoka Art Museum, and Pinaglabanan Galleries. This work questions the optical relationship of light with the construction of space, a curiosity that had been earlier evoked in Sun-Dial Constructions, the work Lee exhibited for the CCP’s Thirteen Artists Award, which she received in 1976.

Awards I. Lee received included the Purita Kalaw Scholarship (1972–1973), the grand prize at the PAP Graphic Arts Competition and first prize in the same competition’s experimental category (1974). In the late 1970s, she gave lectures in the visual arts at the Philippine High School for the Arts and at the University of the Philippines. She represented the Philippines in the 11th International Biennial Exhibition of Prints in Tokyo (1979) and participated in the Asian Artists Exhibition (1980), the forerunner of the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, and the 2nd Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka, Bangladesh (1983).

Upon moving to the Bay Area in 1988, I. Lee joined the San Francisco-based DIWA Arts, a group of Filipino American artists presenting exhibitions and performances concerning the historical, queer and psychological conditions of the Filipino diaspora in the United States. Since moving to Hawaii in 2004, she has participated in group exhibitions of the Honolulu Printmakers, of which she has been a member since 2012.