While in university she was influenced by gender and minority theories, as reflected in her first film, the short Sally's Beauty Spot (1990).
[1] By 1989 she was attending New York University (NYU), studying under Homi K. Bhabha, Faye Ginsburg, and Michael Taussig,[4] with a scholarship.
[7] After graduation, Lee attended the prestigious International Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art before returning to Canada.
[13] After My Niagara, Lee took a position as a director observer on the set of Atom Egoyan's Exotica, and then enrol at a summer program at the Canadian Film Centre (CFC).
[17] The film, which followed a young Korean woman who falls in love with a drifter, was a collaboration with Cameron Bailey and dealt with themes of racial differences, immigration, and social class.
It also featured on-screen sexual intercourse, framed in a medium shot, which Lee intended as a sign and not simply a sex scene.
[19] Although Priceless, meant as a sequel to Subrosa, went through more than thirty drafts, it was ultimately cancelled[20] despite interest from Alliance Atlantis and Citytv.
[20][21] Starring Adam Beach and Sook Yin Lee as Alessa Woo, the Toronto-set film follows an Asian-Canadian art dealer who finds herself living in close quarters with a handsome and talented Indigenous artist but considers him unworthy as he is penniless.
The film also stars Don McKellar, Alberta Watson, Joel Keller, John Gilbert and Siu Ta.
[13] After The Art of Woo, Lee announced that she intended to adapt Kerri Sakamoto's novel The Electrical Field with the author, and a "romantic thriller".
The omnibus also featured works by fellow directors Byun Young-joo, Ulrike Ottinger and Lee Su-yeon.
[28] She writes that she attempts to address these issues through her films in non-didactic ways, such that the "racial melancholia ... are like seepages in the more obvious dramatic or comedic content".
[29] She considers the stereotype of Asian women as seductresses, either demure "lotus blossoms" or vociferous "dragon ladies", to be a degenerative one which is "sometimes extremely offensive", but one that has "a cultural memory that demands [the viewer's] attention.