Seulgi Lee (b. 1972) has expressed her interest in objects, language, and nature closely connected to human life through her own distinctive visual language. She employs a wide range of materials, including everyday objects, and showcases works spanning various genres such as installation, sculpture, painting, and performance.
 
In particular, Lee incorporates traditional and folk elements, such as crafts and folk songs, to create works that mediate the life and culture of communities with the reality that unfolds before our eyes.

Seulgi Lee has been based in Paris, France, since 1992, continuing her artistic practice. In the early 2000s, she actively engaged in experimental art, founding and running the alternative space Paris Project Room and performing works such as wearing Afghanistan’s burqa attire.
 
In 2009, Lee was invited to ‘Evento,’ a biennale held in Bordeaux, France, where she conceptualized a public art project focusing on the urban environment. The artist was particularly intrigued by the bus as a space where temporary communities are formed.
 
For this project, she transformed the bus into a moving monument by placing a mask resembling a furry animal on its front, giving it the appearance of an unknown living organism. The resulting work, IDO, traveled the city's existing routes, carrying passengers while embodying the image of a mysterious creature.

Following IDO, Seulgi Lee continued her exploration of masks as objects, introducing the Clamour series, a smaller-scale mask project. The artist crafted wearable masks by cutting and layering colored paper by hand. These masks collectively represent portraits of multiple identities.

Each mask in the Clamour series is unique in color and design. However, when worn and moved, a built-in device inside the mask produces the same sound, symbolizing the formation of a new community where individuals, despite their differences, ultimately resonate together.
 
This work inherently involves audience participation. The abstract sculptures of faces only become masks when placed on a participant’s face, and the process of creating sound through their movement transforms the experience into a form of "unscripted performance."

Another of Seulgi Lee's notable works, Blanket Project U (2014–), stems from her natural interest in Korean color palettes, shaped by her experiences as an ethnic minority living in France. Through this exploration, the artist focused on the vibrant ‘Nubi’ blankets, which featured the five traditional Korean colors (obangsaek) and gained popularity in Korea during the 1980s.
 
Lee became fascinated by the Korean color schemes, geometric patterns, and the unique spatiality embodied by the blanket as an object. This interest led her to collaborate with artisans from Tongyeong, a region renowned for its traditional quilt-making techniques.

The geometric patterns in Blanket Project U are inspired by Korean proverbs. Lee found the visual attributes of proverbs such as “Fan the burning house” and “A frog in the well knows nothing of the great ocean”. She translated the visual imagery evoked by these sayings into patterns, which were then incorporated into the design of the blankets.

The collaborative project with artisans that began with Blanket Project U later expanded into Basket Project W. This project was carried out in partnership with artisans from Santa Maria Ixcatlán, a small village in northern Oaxaca, Mexico. The aim was to reinterpret the baskets, imbued with the life and culture of the Ixcatlán community, as artistic forms and bring them into the present.
 
Seulgi Lee on the language "Ixcateco," spoken by the indigenous people of Ixcatlán, a minority community in Mexico, who weave palm fiber baskets as part of their craftsmanship. Ixcatteco is a language on the brink of extinction, following the Spanish invasion of the 16th century, and currently, only four people in the Ixcatlán community can still speak it. By using Ixcatteco as the title for her project, Lee highlighted the existence of things that are fading away in our time, drawing them into the contemporary context.

Seulgi Lee has also shown a deep interest in language as a medium that encapsulates the memories and culture of a community. Her work The Island of Women (2019) draws inspiration from the obscene traditional folk songs sung by women in the region of Penvénan, Brittany. The artist spent a month on a small island in the area, known as “The Island of Women (L'île aux femmes),” where she met with singers of these traditional songs and studied their heritage.
 
During this process, Lee encountered Chansons en Poitou by Linette Gendron and used its lyrics as a foundation to create a new song, blending local dialects into the composition. The video work The Island of Women features two women wandering around the island, singing the song crafted by the artist.

Meanwhile, DONG DONG DARI GORI (2020), showcased at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea's “Korea Artist Prize” exhibition in 2020, is a spatial installation work inspired by traditional Korean folk songs. The title DONG DONG DARI GORI is a portmanteau term that combines a famous Goryeo folk song named “동동” (i.e., “Dong Dong,” sometimes called “Dong Dong Dari”) and “달걸이” (i.e., “dalgeori ”), which is a type of folk song.
 
Also, the Korean word “달걸이” contains “달” (moon) and “걸이” (to hang), which inspired Lee to think about a motion or device for hanging the moon. Furthermore, “걸이” is a homonym with “거리” (streets), thus evoking the streets where people walk and interact.

This work, rooted in wordplay and associative imagery, begins with the artist’s imagination that Korean traditional houses must have been transformed into magical spaces when the light of the moon passed through traditional paper of the doors, casting elaborate patterns from the wooden frames of doors and windows. Collaborating with a dancheong (traditional Korean decorative painting) artisan, Seulgi Lee created four large doors that integrate the moon's rotation and the rhythmic patterns of folk songs into the structures of the door’s wooden frame.
 
The installation is further enriched by playful elements. The exhibition space features the Korean folk song “Dari Segi (Counting Legs),” which echoes throughout the gallery, alongside a 17th-century French amusement device called the “Bagatelle” that viewers can interact with. Through these elements, DONG DONG DARI GORI serves as a bridge between the past and the present, weaving together various artistic genres and cultural motifs into a multidimensional experience.

The following year, Seulgi Lee presented the installation Slow Water (2021) at her solo exhibition “Slow Water” at Incheon Art Platform, using Korean traditional door frames as a key element in the work. Created in collaboration with dancheong artisans, Slow Water uses traditional techniques and craftsmanship to geometrically express the passage of time and the experience of space.
 
This work was inspired by the artist’s experience with the frescoes at “Villa de Livia” in Italy, which evoke a sense of the ethereal. Lee connected the shimmering underwater experience from the ancient mural with the site-specific context of Incheon Art Platform, which was once located on reclaimed land. The installation sought to awaken the sensation of wide, slow-moving water within the exhibition space.

In this way, Seulgi Lee has woven a hybrid world by connecting the past and present through everyday objects, blending fine art with craft, tradition with modernity, and the linguistic with the visual. Her works serve as a medium that links the reality before our eyes with another world, evoking what is forgotten in daily life and offering an opportunity for reflection.

“Since prehistoric times, all activities humans have engaged in out of necessity are art. There are still many people who find art difficult. Perhaps the instinctive and intuitive activity of looking at objects with curiosity, connecting different things, and creating something new has been lost due to the pressure of time and institutions.” (Seulgi Lee, Design House M+ Interview, February 2019)

Seulgi Lee was born in Seoul and studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Since 1992, she has lived and worked in Paris. Lee was selected as the winner of the “Korea Artist Prize 2020” presented by the MMCA and SBS Foundation. She has held solo exhibitions at venues such as Gallery Hyundai (Seoul, 2018), the Mimesis Art Museum (Paju, 2015), the Nogent-sur-Marne Art Center (France, 2009), and Ssamzie Space (Seoul, 2004).
 
Lee has participated in major exhibitions such as the 17th Lyon Biennale (2024), the 12th Busan Biennale (2020), the 10th Gwangju Biennale (2014), the 3rd La Triennale (France, 2012), and the 1st Biennale de Bordeaux (France, 2009). She has also been invited to group exhibitions at institutions such as Alternative Space Loop (Seoul, 2021), the Asia Culture Center (Gwangju, 2017), the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (France, 2015), and Kunsthalle Wien (Austria, 2007).
 
Her works are part of the collections of the FRAC IDF Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Île-De-France Le Plateau and the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia.

References

• 갤러리현대, 이슬기 (Gallery Hyundai, Seulgi Lee)
• 올해의 작가상, 이슬기 (Korea Artist Prize, Seulgi Lee)
• 퍼블릭 아트, 이슬기의 비공식 경제
• 갤러리현대, Seulgi Lee 이슬기 : Korea Artist Prize 2020
• 인천아트플랫폼, 느린 물 (Incheon Art Platform, Slow Water)
• 디자인하우스 M+, 이토록 유쾌한 추상!