BERKELEY, CALIF.- The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive has organized the first major retrospective of the acclaimed fiber artist Lee ShinJa outside of South Korea. One of the most important artists to emerge from Korea’s postwar era, the 95-year-old Lee has spent more than half a century advancing the field of Korean fiber arts through a multifaceted practice that incorporates traditional craft techniques with modernist innovations in color, composition, and dimensionality. Spanning the full scope of the artist’s output from the 1950s through the 2000s, Lee ShinJa: Drawing with Thread will feature more than forty of her monumental weavings and smaller-scale works—including the largest work in her acclaimed Spirit of Mountain series, which BAMPFA has newly acquired.

Widely renowned in South Korea—where she was most recently the subject of an acclaimed retrospective exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon in 2023—Lee first began making artworks in the 1950s with found materials such as grain sacks, mosquito nets, and yarn sourced from secondhand garments. Across her long career, she has expanded the boundaries of fiber art practices by incorporating new innovations in embroidery, dyeing, knotting, and weaving to create increasingly large-scale sculptural forms. One of her most iconic works, Wall Hanging (1971), was exhibited at Korea’s National Art Exhibition in 1972, where it was heralded as a major inflection point in the history of Korean tapestry by breaking with traditional textile conventions.

Lee ShinJa: Drawing with Thread has been organized chronologically with an emphasis on the experimental nature of Lee’s practice, which has alternated over time between found and made materials as well as between figurative and abstract designs. Alongside her large-scale works, the retrospective presents woven maquettes and preparatory sketches that provide fresh insight into the development of the artist’s practice.

In conjunction with the exhibition, BAMPFA has acquired Lee’s celebrated tapestry Spirit of Mountain (1999), an important work in her series of the same title that draws inspiration from the natural world and from memories of the artist’s upbringing in Uljin, South Korea. Balancing both formal expression and meditative qualities, this tapestry is marked by its intense chromatic contrasts and strong vertical composition. Spirit of Mountain is being centrally featured in the retrospective, the first time in many years that this work has been presented in a museum setting.

“Lee ShinJa is one of the most visionary artists of our time who has long understood the artistic possibilities of fiber,” said Victoria Sung, Phyllis C. Wattis Senior Curator at BAMPFA, who is curating the exhibition. “Lee’s exhibition follows in the footsteps of recent exhibitions at BAMPFA, including important solo shows with Key Sekimachi and Rosie Lee Tompkins, adding to the Bay Area’s rich history of fiber and textile arts.”

“With the recent resurgence in interest in fiber arts by a pioneering generation of women, it’s important to look toward Asia to expand the lens of this burgeoning canon,” said BAMPFA’s Executive Director, Julie Rodrigues Widholm. “Working alongside her contemporaries like Sheila Hicks and Magdalena Abakanowicz, Lee made critical contributions to the development of international fiber art and we are thrilled to present her first US retrospective at BAMPFA.”

Lee ShinJa graduated from the Department of Applied Arts at Seoul National University in 1955 and later majored in Fabric Design in the Department of Industrial Crafts at Hongik University. In 1965 she became a professor at Duksung Women’s University, where she was the first Dean of the College of Arts and fostered younger generations of artists for more than thirty years. Lee participated in the fifth and seventh National Art Exhibitions of the Republic of Korea in 1956 and 1958 and was honored with the prestigious Minister of Education Prize. Lee’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Korean institutions, including Press Center (1965), Gallery Hyundai (1983), Seoul Arts Center’s Hangaram Art Museum (1993), and the Republic of Korea’s National Academy of Arts (2003). In 2023, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Gwacheon, South Korea, presented the retrospective exhibition Lee ShinJa: Threadscapes, shedding new light on the artist’s remarkable oeuvre.