A view of artist Yeesookyung's exhibition "Moonlight Crowns" at the Art Sonje Center. Courtesy of Art Sonje Center

Since 2002, artist Yee Soo-kyung (also written as Yeesookyung) has continually visited the kilns of some of Korea’s most renowned master potters in Icheon, Gyeonggi-do Province; Gangjin, Jeollanam-do Province; and elsewhere.

But she’s not there for the gleaming, newly fired ceramics. Instead, she collects broken shards from blue and white porcelain, celadon and black-glazed pottery – remnants of works that failed to satisfy the skillful masters and were subsequently smashed to pieces.

By gluing these fragments of failure together with gilded epoxy, she creates bulbous, organic shapes – her own narrative of traditional ceramics. This is how her iconic “Translated Vase” series came to be born.

Years later, in 2017, the artist began to apply this fragment-based composition into another ongoing installation series, “Moonlight Crowns.” The series is currently on display at the Art Sonje Center in Jongno District, Seoul, until September 26.

Similar to “Translated Vase,” her crown series is made up of numerous, disparate fragments – both literal (crystals, gold, pearls, gemstones, steel, brass, mirrored glass) and figurative (crowns, angels, crosses, dragons, magic wands, totems).

Yee takes these fragments of religious and cultural references out of their original context and fuses them all together into a single organic structure. She thus blurs the line between the secular and the religious, the past and present and between myth and history to create her own unique visual narrative.

Over the years, Yee’s series of works have appeared in numerous exhibitions in Korea and abroad in the U.S., Germany, U.K., Russia and Italy, including the 57th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. She has pieces in permanent collections in the U.K. (the British Museum in London) and the U.S. (Princeton University in New Jersey and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), among others.

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