Seulgi Lee
Where do you find motivation for your work, and do you have a routine?
Meeting people and learning new things through projects is my source of motivation and the most exciting part of my work. I always do new things as an amateur would, and I try to unlearn what I have already absorbed as information to re-examine it. I don’t think I am a routine person, and I don’t have a studio-based practice, as I prefer to research projects in libraries and on the internet to find an initial idea before meeting the artisans. For the last ten years, I have travelled and met with Nubi, Dancheong and Munsal artisans in Korea, potters in Morocco, basket weavers in Mexico, and Sudare and Tamari artisans in Japan, among others. I value collaborating with them and learning about their specific know-how. Recently, I had the opportunity to work with George Hook, one of the last mother-of-pearl workers in Birmingham, thanks to an invitation from the Ikon Gallery for my first solo show in the UK. In the future, I plan to work with artisans closer to me in Paris.
How important is transcending cultural and geographical boundaries in your work, and how do you challenge identity stereotypes?
Since childhood, my dream was to be an artist. I moved to an art high school in Seoul by myself, far from my parents, then I came to Paris, where I still live, to pursue my studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Being an asian and a foreigner in Paris felt like a very intense experience, as I had to define and present myself differently. Likewise, when I spent a semester at the Art Institute of Chicago as an exchange student, I had to explain myself in a very different way because I could express my thoughts freely. Culturally speaking, Korea is similar to Japan, where I spent time in residency at Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto, because the collective is predominant over individuality, and people don’t want to disturb collective rules, which means that you don’t easily express personal opinions. In 2020, Jean-Luc Vilmouth, my former professor at the École, told me to look more closely at Korean culture, and having been away since 1992, I have gained the necessary distance to respond to it. It was during a trip to Korea, while searching for a Nubi quilt blanket as a gift for friends in France, that I was told they no longer made them and had the idea to start the Blanket Project U in collaboration with Nubi artisans in Tongyeong, with the support of the Fondation des Artistes. I am grateful to have opportunities to challenge my double culture, and I am eager to explore elsewhere through experience.
How do you merge art and craftsmanship into your work, and what are you trying to communicate with that?
I am fascinated with craftsmanship or ‘craftswomanship’ because the craft may look simple, but requires a specific know-how and is scientifically ingenious. In ‘Anthropology of the Arts’, anthropologist and Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen Tom Ingold writes that ‘the action [read, the weaving] has a narrative quality, in the sense that all movement, like a line in history, is rhythmically developed based on the previous movement, while anticipating the next movement’. This was very evident when I witnessed women weavers weaving and chatting, and walking on a path in a small mountain village called Santa Maria Ixcatlan in the North of Oaxaca in Mexico. Also, I discovered that their weaving technique was similar to Nubi, which I used in my Blanket Project, a project inspired by the symmetry forms in the proverbs, linguistically speaking, that led me to do some geometrical compositions in the place of patterns and to include the very funny Korean proverbs on the blankets. In my solo show SPAN at IKON Gallery in Birmingham, one of the works is a blanket called ‘My three feet nose’ with a triangle in the middle of it representing and evoking a human's nose that stretches down due to fatigue. In this work, we have been vertically sawing this part to accentuate the movement of stretching down, and added a collective recitation, the proverb, to influence the dream of the person who uses this blanket like a votive sculpture, as my works are anthropological objects too.
DONG DONG DARI GORI (2020)
In Korea Artist Prize show at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, photo Cheolki Hong
(Seulgi Lee © ADAGP Paris 2025)
U:Drink the Kimchi Soup = To Hope for Something to Be Given (2024)
Collaboration with nubi quilter Sungyoun Cho in Tongyeong, Korea. Silk, 195 x 155 x 1 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Hyundai Seoul (Seulgi Lee © ADAGP Paris 2025)
U:Laugh out loud while clapping one’s hands (2023)
Collaboration with nubi quilter Sungyoun Cho in Tongyeong, Korea, silk, 195 x 155 x 1 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Hyundai Seoul (Seulgi Lee © ADAGP Paris 2025)
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