At 1,200-degrees Celsius, a drop of molten bronze can burn through flesh in seconds. For Lindy Lee, however, working with this dangerous medium holds a meditative power. This sumptuous materiality permeated Lee’s survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), “Moon in a Dew Drop.” Titled after a book by 13th-century Zen monk Dgen, the exhibition posited that even a single drop—be it water or molten metal—contains the universe.

Born in Brisbane in 1954 to Chinese immigrants, Lee long held a sense of “unbelonging” that she only began to reconcile in the 1990s through Daoism and Zen Buddhism. Their philosophies of chance, the power within each moment, and entanglements between nature, humanity, and the cosmos significantly influence Lee’s work and unfurl in what she terms a “practice of curiosity.”

Lee’s willingness to relinquish control to her elemental materials manifests in two amoebic works installed at the entrance. Made by flinging molten bronze on the ground and rearranging the cooled fragments into geometric formations, Buddhas and Matriarchs and Strange Condensations (both 2020) comprise abstract pools of metal that ooze and writhe across blackened walls like clusters of gilded microorganisms. In pouring ladles of liquid metal, Lee submits to the corporality of an experimental process that casts her not as creator but conduit. These are artifacts of chance that forge shapes of their own volition; surrender cast in bronze.

These works were foreshadowed by the standout installation No Up, No Down, I Am the Ten Thousand Things (1995/2020), Lee’s first artistic expression of Zen Buddhism. Vibrant paper sheets smatter in a kaleidoscope across the white-cube space. Their colors, which recur throughout the exhibition, are laden with symbolism personal to Lee, with blue, for example, embodying the spirit, and orange the energy within all things. Some pages hold ink splashes, referencing the Buddhist calligraphic practice of “flung ink painting.” Others bear photocopies of Renaissance and Baroque works, recalling Lee’s early imitations of Western masterpieces through which she sought belonging within the Eurocentric canon. In the restaged installation they reside alongside family portraits absent from the original, declaring her Chinese heritage as equally worthy of pride and idolatry. In this work the Zen concept of “ten thousand things”—the divine manifested in all directions—exalts the multiplicity of Lee’s identity and liberates it from reductive East-West binaries.

Around the corner, Birth and Death (2003) elevates personal effects into a public monument sanctifying ancestral ties. Accordion books of family portraits printed in blood red and somber black ripple across the floor, reminiscent of photos stowed in lockets, albums, and wallets. An homage to Lee’s late nephew, Ben, following his premature passing, the work is an arresting immortalization of Lee’s kin that weaves each individual into an infinite genealogical tapestry of birth and death.

The interplay of dualities continues in the large-scale installation Moonlight Deities (2019–20), which submerges the audience in a liminal space caught between darkness and light. Developed specifically for the exhibition, its overlapping sheaths of black paper bear perforations that fill the room with web-like shadows. Circular forms mimic cells or galaxies through a telescope, creating a tension between micro and macro, phantom and solid, coalescence and fissure. Perforations appear in Lee’s other works, rupturing the surface of our known reality to reveal a concealed third dimension of shadow. Moonlight Deities commemorates these in-between realms to revere the complex affinities within and between all things.

Upon exiting, audiences encounter the newly commissioned Secret World of a Starlight Ember (2020) teetering on the MCA forecourt. This perforated-steel egg sculpture both reflects and emits light, mirroring passersby amid the throb of harbor life by day and illuminating from within at night. Capturing all in its celestial swirl, it is a final reminder of the beauty Lee finds in connection—with oneself, with others, and with the universe. In a turbulent time, “Moon in a Dew Drop” offered calm amid life’s tempest, inviting audiences to look both inward and outward and find solace in the richness of existence.