Sook-Yin Lee is a Canadian broadcaster, musician, film director, actress and multimedia artist. She is a former MuchMusicVJ and a former radio host on CBC Radio. She has appeared in films, notably in the John Cameron Mitchell movie Shortbus.
Early and personal life
Lee was born in Vancouver, British Columbia.[1] She is the second daughter of father, Leo Lee,[2] from Hong Kong and a mother from Mainland China,[3] Lee was raised as a devout Roman Catholic.[4] Her father was a post-World War II orphan from Hong Kong, and her mother an escapee from Communist China[3] who remained in and out of psychiatric institutions when Lee was young.[5] Lee also has a sister, Deanna, a Vancouver-based artist.[6] She grew up within a strict, secretive and unstable family.[3] When Lee was 15, her parents split up and Lee ran away from home, for a time living on the street[7] before eventually living with a "community of lesbians and artists".[3]
In the mid-1980s, she became the lead singer for Bob's Your Uncle, a Vancouveralternative rock band.[8] Lee often incorporated performance art techniques into the band's melodic rock. When that band broke up, Lee pursued a solo music career, releasing several solo albums and performing as an actor in theatre, film and television projects. She was the lead singer for the band Slan.[9]Neko Case covered Lee's song "Knock Loud" on her 2001 EP Canadian Amp.
She had a long-term relationship with the comic artist Chester Brown from 1992 until 1996. She is depicted in several of his comics. He moved to Vancouver for two years to be with her, and moved back to Toronto with her when she became a VJ for MuchMusic. He also drew the cover for her 1996 solo albumWigs 'n Guns. Brown's relationship with Lee is the last boyfriend/girlfriend relationship he had, as he explains in Paying for It. They remain good friends, and Brown has contributed artwork to her productions as recently as 2009's Year of the Carnivore; in 2024, Lee directed the film adaptation of Brown's graphic novel Paying for It.[10]
She was later in a relationship with writer and musician Adam Litovitz, who was also her frequent artistic collaborator, from 2007 until 2018.[11] They occasionally performed improvised musical sets under the name LLVK, short for Lee/Litovitz/Valdivia/Kamino, and formed the band Jooj, which released its debut album in 2015.[12] An album of music written by Sook-Yin and Adam was completed in 2020 and was released under the title of jooj two in April 2021 on Mint Records.
During her last appearance as a MuchMusic VJ in 2001, Lee and her co-host turned their backs to the camera, and mooned the audience on live television.[15][18]
She became the new host of CBC Radio One's Saturday afternoon pop culture magazine radio-show Definitely Not the Opera in 2002.[19]Definitely Not the Opera completed its run in 2016.[19]
During the Summer of 2008, Lee was a member of the CBC Olympic broadcasting team for the Beijing games.[21] During the games, Lee filmed a TV spot that touched upon concerns regarding human rights and political issues.
In 2016, Lee hosted the 10 episode summer series Sleepover for CBC Radio,[22][23] which continued as a podcast[24] until 2018.
As a feminist, Lee specifically works on films that discuss feminist and/or racial issues. Escapades of One Particular Mr. Noodle (1990) was her debut as a feminist film director. This film was produced by Studio D, a primarily feminist film production company, as one of the short films in their segment Five Feminist Minutes (1990).
In 2003, she became the centre of controversy when Mitchell first announced that he was casting Lee in his film Shortbus (released 2006). Due to Mitchell's announcement that the film was to be sexually explicit in nature – Lee and other cast members perform non-simulated intercourse and masturbation on screen – the CBC initially threatened to fire her.[26] In making Shortbus, Mitchell sought to make a film about love and sex without censoring itself.[27] Celebrities such as director Francis Ford Coppola, R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, actress Julianne Moore and artist and musician Yoko Ono, as well as the CBC's listening audience, rallied behind her, and the CBC ultimately relented.[28] The movie premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Her performance in Shortbus earned Lee the 2007 International Cinephile Society Award for Best Supporting Actress.[29]
This was not her first film that explores a sexually explicit nature. She acted in 3 Needles (2005), a short film about HIV and AIDS. The film takes place in various locations around the world - Canada, China, and South Africa - demonstrating the universality of STDs/STIs.[30]
In 2013, Lee wrote and starred in a theatrical performance show How Can I Forget? at Toronto's Rhubarb and Summerworks theatre festivals.[34] She and Litovitz also staged Morrice Fled: Two Paintings Talk to Each Other, a pop-up performance at the Art Gallery of Ontario based on the art of James Wilson Morrice, in January.
In 2014, Lee choreographed a dance solo for Syreeta Hector as part of On Display for Toronto Dance Theatre. From 2015 to 2017, she created and directed Sphere of Banished Suffering with dancers Jenn Goodwin, Mairi Greig, and Charlie McGettigan with Litovitz developed in residencies with LUFF art+dialogue, Dancemakers, Artscape Sandbox, and premiered at the Festival of New Dance 2017.
In 2019, she wrote and appeared in Unsafe, a documentary theatre production on the topic of censorship, at Canadian Stage.[35]
^ ab
Sayej, Nadja (30 April 2013). "Sook-Yin Lee". Vice. Retrieved 3 July 2019. She got her first big break in 1995 when she was cast as a VJ on Much Music, most notably as the longtime host of the network's cult alternative music show the Wedge.
^"MuchMusic VJs From The 90's And Where They Are Now". Narcity. 6 May 2015. Retrieved 3 July 2019. ... she came to MuchMusic in 1995 where she would become one of the station's most controversial VJs. Hosting their alternative music show The Wedge ...
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Sheppard, Denise (30 October 2001). "VJ looks back on her MuchMusic days". canoe.ca. Archived from the original on 13 July 2012. Retrieved 11 March 2007. From the day she participated in a vigorous game of on-air girl-to-girl tonsil-hockey (to celebrate the addition of the words "sexual orientation" to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms){{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
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Hughes, Fiona (10 December 2001). "The art of Sook-Yin Lee". Vancouver Courier. Archived from the original on 15 January 2004. Retrieved 22 October 2007. On her last day at MuchMusic a couple of months ago, the flamboyant Lee mooned the camera.
^The greatest Canadian. Volume 2, Sir John A. Macdonald ; Terry Fox ; Don Cherry. OCLC415641463. Terry Fox: advocate, Sook-Yin Lee ; directed, written and produced by Leora Eisen ; producer, Jackie Carlos.
^Canada, Government of Canada, National Film Board of (11 October 2012). "National Film Board of Canada". onf-nfb.gc.ca. Retrieved 23 March 2017.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^Baker, Marie Annharte; Blain, Kim; Boschman, Lorna; Browne, Christene; Burns, Alison; Cole, Janis; Dempsey, Shawna; Fleming, Ann Marie; Gagnon, Angèle (1 January 2000), Five Feminist Minutes, retrieved 23 March 2017
