Seulgi Lee

Seulgi Lee has always been drawn to the absurd, the radical and risk-taking, employing humour as a form of resistance. She seeks out correspondences between the mechanisms of crafts and primal gestures in diverse cultures, in their collective dimension. Among her projects are the creation of a silk blanket with nubi quilt artists in Korea; a tenate basket with a cooperative of basket-weavers in a remote Mexican village, communicating in Ixcatec, their endangered vernacular, and a collaboration with a potter in the Rif mountains of Morocco, to explore the relationship between language systems and artisanal practices.

For her residency at Villa Kujoyama, Seulgi Lee met people who were familiar with Akita Ondo: a folk song, sung by women, which has been traced back to the seventeenth century. At the same time, she collaborated with sudare makers. Reputed to have mythological origins, sudare is a screen or blind made from bamboo stems which are cut into thin strips and threaded with silk. She also explored the history of the gaze as part of a project with curator Olivier Mignon at the Keijiban art venue in Kanazawa.

Seulgi Lee has given a number of solo shows: Slow Water at Galerie Jousse Entreprise, Gallery Mendes Wood DM and Incheon Art Platform; We Are Not Symmetrical at La Casa da Cerca in Almada, Portugal, Le Plus Tôt C’est Deux Jours Mieux at La Criée contemporary art centre in Rennes, and Damasese at Gallery Hyundai in Seoul. Her work has also appeared in group shows at Kunsthale Aarhus, Kadist Foundation in San Francisco, CRAC Alsace in Altkirch, the Gwangju Biennial and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. In 2020 she was awarded the Korea Artist Prize for Dong Dong Dari Gori at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, which supported her research during her residency.