An exhibition that opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on March 25 last year was titled "Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie." It is a bizarre name unbefitting a museum, but there is a story behind it. Some European critics in the 18th century disparaged "chinoiserie" from the East as monstrous and unnatural, and this exhibition struck back at that slur with the power of women. It re-read, through a feminist lens, the history in which ceramics that crossed over from China reached Europe and shaped fantasies about the East and foreign lands, as well as ideas surrounding women, sexuality, and race.
The work that drew attention here was Yeesookyung's (63) "Translated Vase," which greeted visitors in the atrium at the center of the exhibition. Its form, revived as a "dazzling monster" by rejoining broken fragments, opened the entire exhibition. Ceramic fragments are joined along golden lines, forming a body of graceful curves. Smoothness holds no charm. The gold, a trace of the cracks, does not erase the flaws but rather makes them stand out. In doing so, it reaches a newer and more powerful beauty. This is Yeesookyung's "Translated Vase" series.
Cases in which names that shine as brilliantly as diamonds today were revered from the start are rare. Vincent van Gogh, unable to properly sell more than a few paintings in his lifetime, was called a byword for madness, and Impressionism was born from the ridicule of critics in its very name. Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" turned its premiere into pandemonium. Many of those who remain remembered as geniuses were treated as eccentrics, and sometimes as madmen, in their own time. The history of brilliance embraces a narrative of overcoming. Rather than trying to erase the spots where they were pointed at as inferior, they turned those very places into stepping stones for a leap forward. Just like Yeesookyung's ceramics, which do not hide the broken places but join them with gold.
It began at the 2001 Albisola Biennale in Italy. Yeesookyung brought "Baekjabu (Ode to White Porcelain)," a poem written by Kim Sang-ok in 1947, and read it to a local potter, having him fashion twelve Joseon white porcelain pieces he had never seen, purely from imagination. At a ceramics workshop she visited after returning to Korea, she experienced a shock. She witnessed the sight of intact ceramics being smashed to preserve the scarcity of masterpieces. While picking up a few of the discarded fragments there and fitting them together this way and that, she experienced the moment when the shattered pieces became one. This is the starting point of "Translated Vase."
This work does not predetermine its form. It comes about on its own, led by the fragments. The gold (gold) joined the cracks (crack) of the broken places. Its very approach differs from Japan's kintsugi, which aims at restoration. Yeesookyung's "gold" is not an adhesive to hide flaws but a brushstroke to reveal wounds. To imbue that line drawn with gold with more expression, the artist even studied traditional Korean dance for five years. This was because she saw the gold line as a single-stroke brush line.
"Translated Vase" became more widely known abroad through the 2006 Gwangju Biennale. At the 2012 "Korea Artist Prize" exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, she spread out 1,000 small works. In 2017, she was invited to the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale, where she presented "Nine Dragons in Wonderland," a large-scale work over 5 meters tall. The Capodimonte Museum in Italy, strict in managing its own national cultural assets, requested that she work using ceramic fragments made in an 18th-century royal ceramics workshop, and those two pieces exceptionally became permanent collection items of the museum. Prestigious institutions at home and abroad, including the British Museum, the Princeton University Art Museum, Leeum, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, hold her ceramics.
Yeesookyung's work is not simply "work of healing and recovery that fills cracks." From the start, it began from an effort to understand the history of exchange and the culture of others that cannot be fully grasped. Those gold lines, which make the breaking stand out even more and find light in ruins, are the tenacious power of "K" itself, which turns hardship and crisis into a leap forward and opportunity.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased Yeesookyung's 5-meter-tall large-scale work as a permanent collection item. Earlier, in 2024, the first Abu Dhabi Public Art Biennial invited her as the only Korean artist. We can now encounter that connection in front of the fountain at Cheonggye Plaza in Seoul. There, where Claes Oldenburg's red twist-shaped "Spring" stands, a glittering lump of gold has been placed. It is one of Yeesookyung's "You Were There" series. General Choe Yeong of the late Goryeo period is said to have declared, "Regard gold as if it were a stone," but this work, conversely, makes one regard a stone as precious as gold. It is an alchemy of the heart.
It began at Baengnyeonsa Temple in Gangjin in 2015. Inspired by the teaching that all things possess Buddha-nature, she applied gold leaf to a stone picked up in the temple courtyard, and a monk placed it in the main hall and installed it permanently. In the 2017 Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) project, she placed stones gathered from across the country atop the rocks of the DMZ. She imbued them with the wish for reunification, like the magic of alchemy that turns stone into gold. On the day the work departed for the Abu Dhabi Public Art Biennial, she held a performance presenting "gueum," a form of Korean traditional music. At the destination, it was welcomed with the traditional music of that place. For this work, she received the 44th Sejong Culture Prize.
"Et in Arcadia Ego," one of the Louvre's signature works, speaks of death that exists even in an ideal land — a presence that is always there and cannot be avoided even in moments we fail to realize. Yeesookyung's "You Were There," which recalls the title of Nicolas Poussin's work, also makes its protagonist a witness that has silently watched the rise and fall of humanity since before prehistory. This work at Cheonggye Plaza was created with the toad rock at the summit of Bugaksan — Seoul's guardian mountain and the old source of the Cheonggyecheon stream — as its motif. It was made from Korean stone, but its universality crosses borders.
"Moonlight Crown" is a work too large and heavy to wear, in which the crown itself becomes the body. Did humanity of long ago perhaps actually see the halo cast behind saints, and did it, as society entered a patrilineal order, harden into a substitute for the inheritance of power, becoming the crown? The artist says she set out from such questions. There is a 2017 paper titled "Lion Peacock Pattern Stone" by art historian Kim Hong-nam, who served as director of the National Museum of Korea, and the research that revealed Silk Road cultural exchange in the patterns of a 3-meter megalith outdoors at the Gyeongju National Museum gave decisive inspiration. Symbols of East and West gathered together to make the "Moonlight Crown." Ancient artifacts such as the Silla gold crown and the Baekje gilt-bronze incense burner, and oral traditions such as the Baridegi tale, are contained in a single work like an overlapping of history. Old stories, she says, resemble the archetypal memory that all of us hold. From the universality of that familiarity, empathy blooms not only among Koreans but even among foreign viewers.
Yeesookyung majored in Western painting at Seoul National University's College of Fine Arts. To her, painting is a skill and a vocation, but also a healing and a discipline. These days, Yeesookyung is immersed in "daily drawing."
"Watching artificial intelligence (AI) that always produces an answer, even telling lies, I found it admirable, but I felt a sense of crisis that it would someday encroach even on the human unconscious. So it was with the thought that I would equip myself with human intelligence (HI), a capacity unique to humans that AI cannot dominate."
The artist volunteered for the harsh training of a storyteller, drawing pictures and writing every day. She unfolded again in April last year the "daily drawing" she had started and stopped in 2004, and the resolve to fill just one year has passed into a second year, heading toward 500 works. Like a spider drawing out its thread, the pictures and writings endlessly vary and multiply. It is on a different dimension from mechanical AI that pours out stories when you input a prompt. What she digs up are the countless stories hidden behind the familiar. Fragmented traces of the past, ancient records, tales, and oral traditions are seeds of possibility that will unfold infinitely. The artist likens herself to a "weighty pouch of seeds."
In Yeesookyung's works, one sees the essence of "K-Art." The reason Yeesookyung chooses Korean subjects — the ceramic fragments, the stone that became gold, the tales — is not to reveal Korea. From the deepest interior of herself and of us, in the most authentic and the most local of narratives, she cultivates the "seeds of universality" that all of humanity can share. The Koreanness of "K," then, is not a closed concept that pens us within a narrow fence. It is a vast will and spirit — one that fully embraces historical wounds and mythic imagination, that profound Koreanness, and yet strides confidently toward a larger world and the cultures of others to gather them into its arms. Just as Yeesookyung's "translation" gathered fragments to captivate the museums of the world, Korean art, too, is expanding — translating the world into ourselves. There, in the very place where what is broken is not cast away but rejoined with gold, the next story of "K" begins to sprout.
