Yona Lee’s 2024 sculptural work Fountain in Transit was commissioned by the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū Foundation for the building’s twentieth anniversary in 2023 and was installed in December 2024. As a large-scale site-specific sculpture, it is nestled under the Gallery’s central marble staircase. Lee’s Fountain is a functioning one, spouting water from unconventionally placed shower heads and taps into a bath and basins of varying design.

Born in South Korea in 1986, Lee is known for what has been described as “elaborate, site-specific installations that respond to and complicate our engagement with urban and domestic environments”. 

Although Fountain in Transit should not be touched, visitors are welcome to sit on the white bench that wraps around the base of the artwork. Small blue circular tables, suited to books or laptops, jut out periodically from the bench at a standing adult’s knee and thigh height.

You hear the work before you see it: water dripping slowly from a tall tap or rushing steadily from a faucet above a hand-washing basin next to two disc-shaped mirrors – one large and facing out to visitors at head height, the other smaller and tilted towards the running tap. Water also splashes from three shower heads – two over a white bathtub and another tilted up so that water spouts over it.

Lee’s work is large, a little over seven metres long and three metres wide – the size of a large room. The sculpture gets progressively taller in accordance with the slope of the staircase directly above it, until it almost reaches the second floor. The highest point is a streetlamp that rises nearly five metres from the floor – about the height of a giraffe – with five glossy white orbs that radiate a clear white glow.

Dotted over the various surfaces of the sculpture are items such as white towels, a white shower curtain, five plants that climb wires, two more variations on streetlamps, the handle of a toilet brush and a white porcelain cup and plate. The stainless steel tubes that transport the water between faucets emerge from a stainless steel base and rise and bend to form the body of the sculpture. The pipes are like handrails, snaking at curved right angles to create a tall network that almost resembles a three-dimensional city map of gridded roads and infrastructure.

Lee made this work in response to the Gallery’s te reo Māori name, Te Puna o Waiwhetū, which can be translated as ‘star-reflecting pool’. When it was first built in 2003, the Gallery had a pool of water under the stairs and crescent-shaped pools in the foyer that rippled from inside to outside under the glass façade, although these have since been removed. The artist also took inspiration from civic fountains as places of gathering, but she has intentionally made this public landmark disarmingly personal. Lee’s fountain is an invitation to participate in the life of the Gallery with an acknowledgment of the way water permeates and pours through every part of people’s lives.