MiKyoung Lee 이 미경

BiographyMiKyoung Lee has been Director of School of Art, Design and Art History, College of Visual and Performing Art in James Madison University. She received her BFA from Dong-A University, and she earned her two masters degrees in Book Arts and Printmaking from The University of the Arts and in Fibers from Cranbrook Academy of Arts. Lee has had nineteen solo exhibitions and a number of national and international lectures, curatorial and collaborative projects, and exhibitions, including the Arizona Art Museum, Cranbrook Museum of Art, Reading Public Museum, Painted Bride Art Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, New York and Chicago SOFA, Hangaram Art Museum, Busan Metropolitan Museum, in Korea, Espace de Tisserands, France, International Fiber Art Fair in Seoul, Korea, 10th International Beijing Fiber Biennale, 8th Beijing International Visual Art Biennale, Jupiter Museum of Art, Haihui Modern Art Museum and most recently Shanghai World Expo Museum, Shanghai, China. Lee was an editor for Art Textile of the World: Korea, Volume I, which was published in December 2005, by the Telos Art Publishing company in London, and she has contributed many essays to the magazines and newspapers in Korea and the USA. Lee has collaborated with the International Opera Theater since 2005 as a costume and set designer, as well as an art director. Lee has been invited to serve as a Foreign Expert from the School of Art and Design, Tsinghua University, in Beijing, and as an Advisory Board member from Center for Emerging Visual Artists, since 2019. Lee is currently serving as a Board member of Directors Surface Design Association and Korean School of Southern New Jersey. In 2022, she was honored to receive a Global Scholar Fellowship from Ewha Womans University, in Seoul Korea.

Artist StatementThe foundation of MiKyoung Lee’s art was shaped by an early fascination with textiles used in her childhood homes in Korea—domestic fabrics made with long- standing techniques. Threading Memories / MiKyoung Lee explores memories from the artist’s childhood and from later chapters of her life that she visually expresses through her textile art practice. By twisting and knotting, a method akin to weaving, Lee uses common, mass-produced products such as pipe cleaners, zip ties, and twist ties to create dynamic, lush, and organic large-scale sculptures as well as intimate two-dimensional, wall-mounted works. The meditative nature of these techniques allows the artist to reflect on and catalogue her memories as she creates; open cavities in many of her works provide metaphorical spaces in which viewers can place their own memories for private contemplation and reflection. Through the material she uses, Lee grounds her work in the present as it speaks to the tension inherent between the natural world and synthetic, human-made materials and substances.

Website https://www.mikyoungleestudio.com