Young-Jae Lee (b. 1951, Seoul) has exhibited widely across Europe, Asia and America. Her works are represented in many public collections, including the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin, the Hetjens Museum in Düsseldorf, the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne, the Modern Pinakothek in Munich, the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her many accolades include the Richard-Bampi Prize (Osnabrück), the State Prize of Bavaria, and the State Prize of Hessen (for the Margareten-höhe ceramics workshop).
Lee studied at the College of Art Education in Seoul from 1968 to 1972 before emigrating to Germany. From 1978 she worked in her own workshop in Sandhausen, near Heidelberg. Since 1987, Lee has been the Director of the Keramische Werkstatt Margaretenhöhe in Essen, a ceramic workshop founded in 1924 as part of the Bauhaus Ceramic School in Weimar. During World War II, Margaretenhöhe entered a period of dormancy, and by the time Young-Jae Lee and Hildegard Eggemann took over the workshop in 1987, the Bauhaus tradition of its founders had been largely extinguished. Young-Jae Lee has since rekindled the Bauhaus legacy of classic design for the people, while adding to it the elegant and functional forms of her native Korea.
