View This: A New York Retrospective of Young-Jae Lee’s Spinach Bowls and Spindle Vases

Though the 73-year-old Seoul-born artist Young-Jae Lee grew up surrounded by traditional Korean pottery, she didn't appreciate the beauty of their unadorned, utilitarian shapes until, at 21, she emigrated to Germany, where she began her own journey as a potter. "If you're standing in a dense forest, you can't see the mountains - only the distance allows you to see the picture in its entirety," says Lee, who has been the director of Keramische Werkstatt Margaretenhöhe, a Weimar-era ceramic workshop in Essen, since 1987. In "Forms From the Earth," an upcoming retrospective at New York's David Nolan Gallery, her now signature spinach bowls and spindle vases, to which she's devoted the better part of her career, carry echoes of both the ancient art of dal-hang-ari (moon jars) and the form-meets-function legacy intrinsic to the 20th-century Bauhaus movement. With their subtle variations in contour and color, the deceptively simple yet technically complex geometric clay vessels stand as testaments to the infinite potential that can be found through the humble act of repetition. As she puts it, "My work is always a process, and an exhibition is not a conclusion but only a part of the whole." 

October 31, 2024