Yee Sookyung, 63, gained global recognition when her "Translated Vase" series — fragments of cracked and broken ceramics rejoined with gold to give them new life — was featured at the main exhibition of the 2017 Venice Biennale. A leading contemporary artist, her works are held by premier institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery in London, which have also invited her to special exhibitions.
Yee draws motifs from Korean tradition but reinterprets them in a contemporary visual language, serving as a "cultural translator" who delivers the universal with elegance. Having recently shown work at the Cernuschi Museum in Paris and the Abu Dhabi Public Art Biennale, she has now begun exploring inner divinity and spiritual sovereignty through the 21st-century media of digital technology and artificial intelligence (AI).
Yee's new video works make their debut in "Fail Better," a joint exhibition running through June 13 at Forum & Space in Seoul's Gangnam district and Bido Gallery on Jeju Island. Curated by independent curator Kim Yunkyung, the two-person show also features media artist Yangachi, who has long probed the realities hidden behind technological advancement. Borrowing its title from Samuel Beckett's 1983 prose work "Worstward Ho," Kim said the exhibition "began by asking what questions art can pose amid the radical perceptual shifts brought on by AI's rapid development, and the coexistence of enthusiasm and warning around new technologies." She added that it "reveals the stance of two artists who, in a world saturated with an AI-like compulsion to produce an answer to every question, repeatedly and precisely miss the mark in order to 'fail better.'"
"Moonlight Crown," previously shown on a large scale at Art Sonje Center in 2021, has been reborn as a video that breathes and shifts ceaselessly through interactive technology synchronized with real-time data. The original sculptural installation was based on the Korean folktale of Princess Bari, an abandoned child who becomes a deity after obtaining the water of life to save her parents. The new version embeds cosmic cycles into the crown: its lower section uses GPS to locate the viewer and divides the time of day into seven intervals based on the sun's movement; the middle section reflects seven real-time weather conditions; and the upper section presents seven lunar phases — combining to generate 343 distinct configurations. Shimmering with a surreal glow, the crown refuses any fixed form, meeting each viewer differently moment to moment.
Another new piece, "Oh, Rose!," is the product of "digital breeding": the artist digitally modeled data from her near-daily rose drawings, diary-like in their regularity, and rendered them through an AI-based generative system. By combining five rose colors, two stem colors, and 12 backgrounds, the work yields 120 distinct varieties of roses. It is a compelling experiment in how a rose — granted "eternal life" in a digital environment where it never wilts — can multiply and evolve infinitely through technology.
Crossing time, space, and media in her practice, Yee will appear as an artist speaker at "Pixel & Paint," a special program of the 2026 Seoul Forum to be held on the 28th of this month at the Yeong Bin Gwan of The Shilla Seoul. There she will discuss where her art, rooted in Korean tradition, is headed. As the global wave of K-culture fuels rising expectations for "K-art," Yee says her individuality is her competitive edge. In an interview with Seoul Economic Daily, she revealed the rigorous discipline behind building her own narrative capacity: "Since April 2023 I have been drawing and writing every day, and the work now exceeds 400 pieces. I'm proud that I've equipped myself with a 'human intelligence' capable of producing stories as creatively as AI — if not more so." At Pixel & Paint, she will share an intimate account of the roots from which her individual works spring and the direction in which they are moving. Yee received the 44th Sejong Culture Prize for introducing Korean art to the Middle East, and her work "It Was There — Cheonggyecheon 2025," selected in the Seoul city public art competition commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Cheonggyecheon restoration, will be on permanent display at Cheonggye Plaza through 2030.
