Ode to Seed by Ke Sook Lee
By Elizabeth Kirsch

To leaf through Ke Sook Lee's book Ode to Seed is to take a magical, imaginary walk with the artist through the poetically conceived cycles of her life.

Born in Seoul, Korea in 1941, Lee grew up in a time when girls and women lived highly constricted lives. Much of her art deals with the plight of anonymous females whose dreams were too often thwarted due to cultural restrictions. Her internationally honored art is not only a paean to her well-honed esthetic skills, but to the skilled labor of thousands of unnamed women – artisans, mothers and householders – through the ages.

Lee remembers a time when women seldom left the house, their world view limited to what could only be seen through windows. Their most common artistic expression was in the form of embroidery, which she practiced throughout childhood. Lee received a B.A. in applied art in 1963 from Seoul National University, but even though she was a top student, she had difficulty finding work as a female artist in Korea.

Lee moved to the United States in 1963 when her husband, Dr. Kyo Rak Lee, became head of Interventional Radiology at the University of Kansas Medical Center. Largely involved in domestic routines, Ke Sook raised their two sons but also completed a B.A. in painting in 1982 at the Kansas City Art Institute. She quickly achieved recognition with her installations and collages, which from the beginning featured fabric and embroidery.

The great textile artist Anni Albers was restricted to working in fiber because of gender bias at the Bauhaus school in the 1920s, where she studied. Yet she bested the male students with her pioneering fiber art that is now deeply sought after.

Albers described cloth as "the pliable plane," both as a material and as a platform for emotions. Lee has borrowed from the rich textile heritage of her culture, as have so many other women around the world, to equate material with memory, to exemplify how even the smallest pieces of cloth are resilient, with the capacity to be made even stronger as stitches are added to them.

A wonderful painter, Lee equates her embroidery marks as brushstrokes. Although the pages of her book appear quite fragile and delicate, the hardiness of her layered and stitched collages are a metaphor for the strength and durability of the multiple demands placed upon women throughout time.

As Lee wrote for her 2007 exhibition Material Girl at the Riverside Museum, California:

Recycled vintage household linen holds trace of
Past generation of women's mundane life experience.
Adopting endless shapes and forms from life
Recognizing women's dream space.


Lee's art ranges from large and three-dimensional to minute, and her work is often accompanied by her poetic text. Ode to Seed, was created in the best haiku fashion, combining tiny pieces of cloth and embroidery on one page with their lightly penciled descriptions on the opposite side.

Seldom has one artist conveyed so much raw emotion with so little signage.

Her collages begin with exquisite renderings of her life as a seed, implanted in a garden, "watering and waiting," "under blue sky." She then poignantly expresses her changes due to life in a new culture, where loneliness becomes its own kind of freedom, and the seed "awakens." She is now "breathing on earth," despite "storm clouds" and "earthly pain." She is "rooting on earth," and an upward line of red shows that she is "standing on her own feet." She is now "lifting all possible," as evidenced by an upward cascade of looped circles, and "Beyond possible," and in the end "bursting with her whole being."

Ode to Seed functions beautifully as an artistic memoir. But at this time in her life Lee says her book also serves as a roadmap for all human beings who look to survive during difficult times.

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