Now In Korea
Reviving the Cracked with Gold
Creatrip Team
a month ago
Artist Lee Su-gyeong’s new public sculpture “I Was There_Cheonggyecheon 2025” — installed at Cheonggye Square for the 20th anniversary of Cheonggyecheon’s restoration — is a gold-clad stone embedded with ceramic shards. Lee, known for her “Translated Ceramics” series that stitches broken pottery together and fills gaps with gold, says the work honors overlooked things by revealing hidden stories when surfaced with gold leaf. The new piece references a toad-shaped rock from the Bukaksan peak (a former Cheonggyecheon water source) and uses ceramic fragments found during the restoration as material. Lee’s “I Was There” series began in 2015 after a monk told her “everything has Buddha-nature (불성),” inspiring her to gild ordinary stones and witness their ceremonial transformation. Her earlier series, “Translated Ceramics,” grew from seeing a master potter smash a ruined piece; Lee reassembled the fragments into monumental works that reflect personal themes of survival and “death anxiety,” linked to her own near-death birth story. Her large-scale installations have shown at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and upcoming Taipei Biennial. Despite big projects, Lee continues daily drawing and writing poetry, hoping to exhibit “poem-drawings” that express her unique artistic language in an age of AI-simplified language.
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