ART CITIES:Paris-Young Jae Lee
Born in Seoul in 1951, Young-Jae Lee studied at the College of Art Education in her native city before moving to Germany in 1972. After studying ceramics and design at Wiesbaden Polytechnic from 1973 to 1978, she ran her own workshop in Sandhausen near Heidelberg. Since 1987 Lee has been running the long-established Ceramics Workshop Margaretenhöhe in Essen.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Karsten Greve Arhive
After having mastered single geometric shapes and the technical skills of pottery making, Lee started to combine different geometrical forms from the late 1980s onward. Inspired by Constantin Brancusi’s “Colonnes Sans Fin” she combined geometric modules on the vertical and created the first examples of her spindle vase form. It was especially Goethe’s poem on the Gingko tree (in which he talks about the oneness of two allegedly separate parts of one leaf) that released her creative energy to master this form, which she contends should not be interpreted as a copy of Korean moon jars. Young-Jae Lee’s solo exhibition “Céramique” at Galerie Karsten Greve in Paris focuses on these spindle vases. This form of design is based on the hang-a-ri, a Korean storage vessel, whose round form is dictated by the abundance of its intended content. Developed from practical use, the mouth was made larger than the foot to allow stacking (the foot fits into the mouth of the jar below). The typical form is a smooth sphere, but Lee’s version consists of two separately thrown bowls, almost mirror images of each other, which are then put together so that their rims meet, forming a visible join, comparable to the putting together of open hands. From the 16th Century and the Japanese occupation that began around that time, the traditional hang-a-ri came to be distinguished by a white glaze resulting from a shortage of colored pigments. White, the absence of color, became the symbol of mourning for the loss of Korean identity, a significance which was veiled by the use of the term “moon pot” in collector circles in the 1920s and 30s. It was above all the white of these traditional vases and its roots in Korean history that led Young-Jae Lee to ceramics in the first place. Although Young-Jae Lee takes up the white of Korean pottery, she does not retain the pristine form of her predecessors. Pursuing a minimalist view of form, Lee combines, in the harmonious union of bowls, both historic and contemporary design principles. She is not concerned with formal invention, nor with originality, but with the individuality of the vessel, the singularity of the resulting sculptural form. As a result of the firing in a wood-fired kiln, individual flakes of ash land on the pale glaze, giving rise to dark speckles and uneven patches in the surface.
Info: Galerie Karsten Greve, 5 rue Debelleyme, Paris, Duration: 1/3-14/4/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.galerie-karsten-greve.com
