Translated Vases
Soo-Kyung Lee, Translated Vases 1, 2, 3
Soo-Kyung Lee, Translated Vases 4, 5, 6
Soo-Kyung Lee, Translated Vases 7, 8, 9
Soo-Kyung Lee, Translated Vases 10, 11, 12
Traveling to Albisola from Seoul, her interest rests in collaboration with local practitioners of the ceramic studios — a process of spontaneity, translation, and “inter-subjective dialogue”. Anna Maria Pacetti, the Albisolist under the instruction of Lee, fabricated 12 white vases after the 18th century Choson Dynasty kind. Tales about the vases were translated for Anna Maria, prior to her decorating of the vessels — a test on the part of Lee who wanted to expose notions or biases of larger Eastern culture. The texts, transliterated from Korean into English and Italian underwent grave disruption and misinterpretation. Lee describes this procedure, “along with the different stages of translation, the notion of the white porcelains of the Choson Dynasty de-materialized from vases to text and then translated, transformed, rematerialized and re-presented as vases”. In this way, Korean nationalist icons transculturated into hybridic objects as their “forms and images were interwoven with regional characteristics of both Italian and Korean culture”.
Lauri Firstenberg
Translated Vases by Soo-Kyung Lee was made in Albisola in 2001 during the 1st Biennial of Ceramics in Contemporary Art “The Happy Face of Globalization” and was also presented at the exhibition “Artist's Ceramics”, Ariana Museum, Geneva, 2002.
Parental plates
Soo-Kyung Lee, Parental plates
Soo-Kyung Lee, Parental plates
Parental plates
I interviewed 12 residents in Albisola and Savona. I asked them to entrust with me one or more plates that are precious mementos of their parents or ancestral family members. In each interview, the plates provided the point of departure for both explicit and implicit memories that flashed across the interviewee’s minds with regards to their relations and especially their mothers who were most closely associated with the plates. Following the interviews, the 20 plates that they presented were faithfully copied at the Studio Ernan Design in Albisola. I plan to serve Korean food on the 20 plates at the opening to give my thanks to the local people who kindly allowed me to visit their homes for the interviews.
Soo-Kyung Lee
Parental plates by Soo-Kyung Lee was made in Albisola in 2003 during the 2nd Biennial of Ceramics in Contemporary Art.
