Lee ShinJa: Drawing with Thread: BAMPFA
“Without any formal training in embroidery or weaving, I often became the subject of ridicule, with people jokingly asking whether I stitched my works with my toes instead of my fingers.”
—Lee ShinJa
Lee ShinJa: Drawing with Thread is the first North American survey on the work of the historically underrecognized Korean artist Lee ShinJa (b. 1930, Uljin, South Korea; lives and works in Seoul). Spanning more than five decades between the 1950s and the early 2000s, the exhibition showcases the artist’s bold innovations in fiber through forty monumental textile works, woven maquettes, and preparatory sketches.
Lee began her career in the wake of Korea’s independence from Japan in 1945 and is today recognized as one of the first fiber artists in Korea. Her artworks from the 1950s incorporated everyday objects and found materials, such as grain sacks, mosquito nets, and domestic wallpaper; notably, she used yarn salvaged from secondhand sweaters and bedding to make her earliest tapestries. Breaking with dominant idioms and traditions of craft, Lee integrated dyeing, knotting, weaving, and embroidery techniques to make increasingly large-scale sculptural forms at the intersections of art and craft, found and made objects, and figuration and abstraction. The works in the exhibition—the majority of which will be on view outside Korea for the first time—showcase the visionary output of an artist who has for decades forged new paths for understanding the artistic possibilities of fiber.
