CreatripTeam

Artist Lee Wan’s solo exhibition “Made in Korea: Wigs and Jipsin (straw shoes)” opens at the Koreana Museum, running through Nov 29. The show is the culmination of his ‘Made in Korea’ series, a return to Korean roots after years documenting globalized production. Since 2013 Lee has traveled across Asia making materials by hand to experience the “temperature of labor.” In this Korean iteration he weaves wigs, braids jipsin, and makes hanji (traditional Korean paper) and ink, reviving techniques that have been fragmented by modernization and Western perspectives. The works—sculpture, installation, video, and documentary—reframe items like jipsin as condensed records of labor and wigs as a bodily metaphor where artificial beauty meets traditional craft. Lee’s practice interrogates how capitalism, globalization, and now AI and transhumanist ideas reshape sensory memory and the transmission of craft; he was Korea’s representative at the 2017 Venice Biennale and continues to develop a “philosophy of the hand.”