LEE SHINJA

Featuring preliminary sketches of her early compositional ideas and archival materials that highlight her role as a dedicated educator and researcher, ‘Weaving the Dawn’ will be on view from August 22 to September 28, 2024, with a reception taking place on Friday, September 13, from 6–8 pm.

Born in 1930 in Uljin, Korea, while the country was under Japanese colonial rule, Lee first encountered textiles through the women in her life. As a child, she played with her mother’s sewing rings, and watched her grandmother weave cloth for household use. In a 1977 conversation with critic Yoo Keun Joon, she remarked that it was natural for women to gravitate towards embroidery within the limited scope of applied arts at the time. Her innovative spirit can be felt early in her practice when she boldly integrated appliqué and dyeing into her embroidery. In Image of the City (1961), she unraveled the plain weave of the base fabric and twisted subtly colored threads to the loosened ones to create a structural tension previously unseen in traditional textiles. Meanwhile, Portrait of My Daughter (1962), modeled after her second daughter, broke formal embroidery conventions with its semi-abstract representation of a face and hands.