KE-SOOK LEE: BETWEEN CULTURES AND GENERATIONS
NOT ONLY PRESERVING ANCIENT SKILLS, HER WORK SUGGESTS THEIR METAMORPHOSIS
INTO A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE OF ART
American Craft, December 2004 /January 2005
BY SIGRID WORTMANN WELTGE
Ke-Sook Lee is emerging as an important artist of our time. But how to take her measure? Her work is so multivalent, so personal and complex, it resists neat categorization.
Variously referred to as mixed media, installation or fiber art, it has visceral presence
that holds viewers in thrall.
The art of Ke-Sook Lee mirrors her life. She draws inspiration from the
duality of having roots in two countries, of practicing as a professional
artist while relishing the role of mother, homemaker and gardener. Born
in 1941 in Seoul Korea, she experienced not only family division but family
loyalty and, above all, matriarchal strength. As a child she shared a room
with her grandmother and great-grandmother, expert needlewomen who passed
their skills on to their charge. A year after receiving a B.F.A. in applied
art from Seoul National University in 1963, Lee and her husband immigrated
to the United States. She pursued postgraduate studies at the University
of Missouri and in 1982 received a second B.F.A., in painting, from the
Kansas City Art Institute, where she later taught mixed media drawing.
While mother hood interrupted Lee's career, it also became the springboard for
her future artistic direction. Abandoning drawing and oil painting for calligraphy
on rice paper, she then took up stitching and embroidery. The domestic sphere
- sewing, mending, ironing and tending to house and garden - is the underlying
theme of each of her creations. Her preferred material is tarlatan, a sheer plain
- woven cotton, heavily sized for stiffness. It serves as the foundation for
her multilayered collages, but is itself manipulated to convey directional lines
through sharply ironed creases. Lee has as much affection for her collection
of American domestic fabrics - worn pillowcases, towels and doilies - as she
does for Korean rice paper. She unites these seemingly disparate materials
by stitching them onto tarlatan. Her vibrant needlework not only expresses the
beauty of calligraphic line, but also provides a text extolling simple domesticity
Earth from her garden provides pigments for the subtlest color gradations.
Lee's most recent work, "Stitches from the garden," an exhibition/installation
at Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, this past June, consisted of various smaller
pieces, but was dominated by oversized Aprons mounted against the wall and Arm
Pillows suspended from the ceiling. One imagined that a gigantic earth mother
had just left the room. Lee celebrates and honors women’s domestic duties by
bestowing heroic status on objects that normally go unnoticed. At first glance Apron
3:Her Earth is Warm, 2004, has a quilt-
like appearance, except for the pleated ruffle at the bottom and apron strings
trailing to the floor. Despite the partially diaphanous material, its presence
is overwhelming. Each square contains or is overlapped by amoebic shapes and
circles of appliqued rice paper
and doilies. Embroidered into place, they are surrounded by exuberantly expressive
stitched lines. One cannot help being reminded of Matisse's Joie de Vivre.
Spirals, ancient symbols of spirituality, are another recurring theme. This
affirmation of life is evident in the title of the Apron pieces- Seed
Pods and Maternity.
Earth pigments impart deep, rich hues, resulting in a surface reminiscent of
Italian marble. Reflecting a modern, abstract aesthetic, the Aprons are simultaneously
flat and dimensional.
The Arm Pillow pieces, like floating wind socks, are full of visual surprises.
Looking at and through the layers of tarlatan, one sees changing yet interacting
planes. Stitches hold the familiarly shaped appliques in place, but they
also surround and draw attention to cut outs, which form windows and voids,
underlined by sharply ironed directional creases. "Arm Pillow" in
Korean means Pallbegae, a mother’s comforting and cradling
presence. Lee’s arm and breast pillows are metaphors for mother’s body-soft,
yet protective and strong. They are, Lee says, "symbols of women’s hard
work, their uncon- ditional love for the family and [their role] nurturers and
givers of comfort."
Although Lee's work is undeniably feminine in subject matter, its minimalist
style has universal appeal. By means of singular artistic vision and nontraditional
materials and techniques, she has achieved a transfiguration of images that
might easily have slid into sentimentality. Her two variations of Seed
Pods on Clothesline, for instance, are starkly
abstract, evocative pieces whose interpretations are entirely personal and open-ended.
she is, in her words "exploring the boundaries of art making." At the
same time, she is a storyteller recalling a vanishing way of life. While motherhood
has not changed, female domestic chores certainly have. The needle skills Lee
so vividly conjures up are unknown to modern young women pursuing professional
careers. Her work, therefore, not only pre- serves ancient skills but suggests
their metamorphosis into a universal language of art.
Ke-Sook Lee's art resonates because it is at once ancient and modern. A
woman of two countries, she stands between cultures and generations. She
has listened to her ancestors, to women in their private sphere, to her
garden and the exigencies of contemporary mark making. From the experience
of her life she has created a multilayered yet unified body of work provoking
the extraordinary power of art to transform the ordinary.
Sigrid Wortmann Weltge is professor emerita at Philadelphia University and the author of
Bauhaus Textiles: Women Artists and the Weaving Workshop (Thames and Hudson, 1998)
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