Youngjoo Lee
Jeweller
Published: 08.07.2025
naver.comBio
Youngjoo Lee is a jewelry artist based in Seoul, Korea. She holds a B.F.A. in Craft from Konkuk University and an M.F.A. in Metalwork and Jewelry from Seoul National University. She has taught at various institutions and participated in numerous exhibitions and fairs both domestically and internationally.Her work explores the relationship between form and repetition, material and time—investigating how identity and difference are shaped through interrelation. She seeks to evoke the unseen rhythm and quiet structures of everyday life through craft practice.
Statement
My practice begins with “Kanon”—a rule, a rhythm, a structure in which variation arises. Just as musical canons unfold through repetition and transformation, I explore how form emerges through quiet shifts within strict yet generative systems. These structures are not rigid, but breathing—like silent harmonies shaped by time and touch.In recent years, my focus has deepened toward how matter itself can embody rhythm. My latest body of work, Melody within Matter, considers how materials—not only shaped by hands or tools, but by their own internal resonance—form a language of subtle pulses. I build vessel-like forms and interwoven structures that draw from traditional Korean craft principles while incorporating algorithmic modeling and parametric design. Through this, I seek to merge ancient aesthetic sensibilities with computational logic and contemporary material concerns.
Each work is constructed through a labor-intensive process of connecting and polishing metal—especially sterling silver and stainless steel—without adhesives or external fasteners. Whether folded, slotted, or interlocked, these structures rely on the material’s own elasticity and strength. Paper, too, appears in earlier works as a delicate counterpoint—light, impermanent, yet essential in its capacity to form volume through accumulation and fold.
I see craft as a way to embody both continuity and transformation. Programming introduces variables that allow forms to evolve, but traditional making grounds the work in intuition and bodily rhythm. I am interested in how rules can allow for emergence, and how matter can speak—not metaphorically, but through structure, resistance, and flow.
Ultimately, my work invites a quiet listening: to the rhythms within form, the breath within materials, and the sensuous intelligence of making. In a world of speed and spectacle, I return to repetition not as habit, but as ethics—a way of living attentively with time, form, and matter.
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