Ode to Seed by Ke Sook Lee
By Diana Li

Ke Sook Lee's Ode to Seed is a collection of hand-embroidered stitches with windows of light and color opening to infinite possibilities. Each page is minimalist in design, yet full of tactile meaning and breath.

It's worth noting that this book was created during the COVID-19 pandemic, when our mortality brought necessary attention to our respiratory system, and sheltering in place had us stay put, only to visit our loved ones and elders through windows and homemade cloth masks. In the wake of the intensified discrimination and xenophobia of that time, the world further closed in on many of us, afraid of attacks on our BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities, and on Asian women and elders. Where there is isolation and fear, however, there is a turn toward self- reflection, awareness, compassion and liberation. In more ways than one, Ode to Seed poignantly archives a personal and intimate journey of finding freedom and wholeness through stillness, loneliness and silence, moments so many of us experienced in this shared period of our lives.

Beyond the pandemic, Lee's artistic practice makes use of thread to mark openings or "windows" as she calls them. She dedicates her threadwork to an inheritance of kindred memories, tracing feminine aesthetics derived from the work of women in her family lineage:

"When [my grandmother] embroidered a red flower on my beoseon (Korean socks), I asked her to make it a yellow flower, but she insisted it had to be red, because she wanted me to grow up to be a beautiful woman," Lee wrote in an email to me about the origins of her work. “She did not know how to write and read, as women weren't sent to school…But she knew how to express her passion and dream through her embroidery. That inspired me."

So much weight lies upon our feet. Her grandmother’s beoseon are intersectionally woven into the footsteps Lee has taken throughout her life as a Korean immigrant, a wife, a mother and grandmother. With this memory embedded in her artistic creations, Lee grounds herself in the warmth, comfort and empowerment of women's work, creating "windows" into the soles and souls of femininity. “Standing on her own feet,” the artist intersperses poetic titles throughout the book. Each page of Ode to Seed ponders embroidered lines of where we begin and end, where we uproot and root ourselves to wait, to dream, to breathe, to land across seasons, "Over that ocean to this ocean."

The threads between our diasporic footsteps connect us to the earth, the sky, the sun and water. "She / A Flown Seed by the Wind," Ode to Seed reflects the artist's ecology of self, in a delicately punctured fiber of being, a response to the ever-winding odyssey of seeking wholeness.



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