As a child, Lee ShinJa would often accompany her father to watch the sunrise in the serene landscapes of Uljin, South Korea, where towering mountains meet the vast ocean. Now in her nineties, the trailblazing fiber artist continues to take inspiration from this childhood ritual of observing dawn. Her seven-decade career, defined by her luminous tapestries, has always been influenced by the natural beauty of her birthplace. “The sunrise views there have always been the foundation of my work,” said Lee in an email interview with Artsy.
“In the 1990s…I found myself thinking a lot about my hometown,” she continued, discussing her “Spirit of Mountain” series, which features polychromatic wool-threaded tapestries of countryside landscapes. These works will be showcased in her first solo exhibition in New York, “Weaving the Dawn,” opening at Tina Kim Gallery on August 22nd. This exhibition follows the gallery’s announcement of its representation of Lee in June. A teacher, pioneer in textile art, and co-founder of the Korean Fiber Artists Association, Lee—now 94—is receiving unprecedented international recognition immediately following her first major retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Gwacheon, South Korea, which closed in February.
Coming of age in a time of war
An avid painter throughout her childhood, Lee was admitted to the Department of Applied Arts at Seoul National University in 1950, a time when few women were admitted to such programs. “Despite this societal expectation for women, I was determined to not fall behind,” Lee said. However, after the Korean War broke out only a few months later, she was forced to evacuate the city and move to Busan, where she would continue her studies.
Driven by scarcity of resources, Lee explored how to incorporate unconventional art materials—from burlap sacks to old sweaters—in her work, using weaving techniques she learned from her grandmother. Meanwhile, Lee earned an income by painting portraits of American soldiers and producing charts for Korea’s Military Administration, using the money to buy secondhand clothes from the Gukje Market in Busan that she would then unravel for material. At the time, even using fabric or thread as art materials in any capacity was relatively unheard of in Korea.
“I love creating new things, and there were no teachers to learn from at university, so I worked independently,” Lee said. “I wanted to do something different from what others were doing. The establishment of textiles as an academic field in Korea didn’t come until much later.”
A maverick fiber artist
Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, Lee continued experimenting with fabric and weaving before truly embracing tapestry as an art form. Her work as a painter was panned due to sexist misconceptions that her husband, Jan Woonsang, a painter of Miin do (a Korean genre of painting showing idealized feminine beauty), was the artist behind her work. Such assumptions pushed Lee to carve out a creative identity independently. She recalled that even Ucchin Chang, a prominent modern Korean artist, suggested she pursue painting, but Lee was determined to explore unconventional mediums. “If I had followed that path, Lee ShinJa as she is known today would not have existed,” she said.
By 1965, she was seeing some early success, with the Press Center in Seoul hosting her debut solo exhibition. There, she showcased several of her first woven collages, crafted from everyday materials such as mosquito nets, aluminum foil, and old magazines. At first, these works sparked widespread criticism from the Korean art world. “Some even disparaged my work, saying that I used my feet rather than my hands, and accused me of debasing Korean embroidery,” Lee recalled. Still, works like Image of City (1961)—a tapestry that will be part of the show at Tina Kim Gallery, in which Lee unraveled portions of woven cloth to braid and coil new fibers—would act as a precedent for her multimedia tapestries.
Then, in the early 1970s, Lee encountered her first tapestries in Paris and at the 1970 Osaka World Expo in Japan. In awe of fabric art’s potential, she embraced the medium, ingeniously repurposing fibers or even incorporating dyed fishing lines to create evocative, colorful textiles. At the 1972 National Exhibition, she presented Wall Hanging (1971), which is now considered Korea’s first-ever exhibited tapestry work, according to Tina Kim Gallery. The gallery noted that this led to the reclassification of the National Exhibition category from “dyeing crafts” to “dyeing and weaving crafts.”
Her work began to focus intensely on the natural color palette she remembered from Uljin, particularly its sunrises. Her tapestry Dawn (1980), which is included in the upcoming show, captures the sunrise cresting over the mountains, ablaze with warm reds, yellows, and oranges of daybreak. In the 1980s, after the passing of her husband, her work adopted a more personal touch. Her journey through grief is represented by stark contrasts of red and black, expressing despair in works like Prayer I (1985).
Threading paths for a new generation
Though she became a pioneer for fiber arts through her artwork alone, Lee also worked tirelessly as an educator and a mentor, beginning in 1965 when she was appointed as an assistant professor at Duksung Women’s University. Her commitment to nurturing the next generation of artists, particularly women, is evident in her three-decade tenure. To begin with, there was no dedicated art department for her field of study (she was initially housed in a department similar to modern home economics), but eventually, she established the Department of Living Art (later the Department of Industrial Arts), encompassing woodworking, metal crafts, and graphic design. She would play a key part in inaugurating the textile art major in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, as a founding member and the first president of the Korean Fiber Arts Association, she helped launch the Korean Fiber Art Biennale in 1984. Once she retired from teaching in 1997, Lee opened Gallery Wooduk in 1997, continuing her support for young, experimental artists, much like herself.
Long-overdue recognition
Earlier this year, the MMCA presented the fabric artist’s first major retrospective, “Threadscapes.” Tracing her work from the 1950s to the 2000s, featuring more than 90 works, the exhibition explored her pivotal role in defining the country’s fiber art movement. Now, “Weaving the Dawn” at Tina Kim Gallery will highlight the artist’s evolution from her earliest tapestries from the ’70s, including a minimalist cotton and thread on linen cloth Screen (1979), to her “Spirit of Mountain” series from the ’90s, which integrates metal frames into the tapestries, transforming them into window-like panels that offer viewers a space to contemplate nature’s lasting beauty.
Regardless of how far Lee traveled or how innovative her textiles became, the nonagenarian artist remained inspired by her roots: the landscapes of her childhood in Uljin and the weaving traditions passed down from her grandmother. But ultimately it’s her materials that have been the source of lifelong obsession for this icon of South Korea and textile art: “Fiber is a material that has existed as long as human civilization, closely tied to culture and driven by historical necessity,” she said. “If I were to name what inspires me, it would be fiber itself.”
—Maxwell Rabb
