Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (BIMA) recently opened the thought-filled exhibition “Tethered.” Featuring the artists’ books and paper works of Aimee Lee, “Tethered” seems a curious reference to her material of choice: paper. In our post-industrial, digitizing society, paper is both ephemeral and increasingly immaterial; “Untethered” might better describe our relationship with paper as we tread into a paperless world.
Yet for Lee and others who work with handmade paper, and are immersed in its culture, the material is grounding. In contrast to commercial paper, traditional handmade papers are sturdy and durable and can endure as long as 1000 years. Carefully procured and prepared natural fibers, along with the laborious multi-step process to finish a single sheet with a unique texture and deckle edge, are paper’s creation story. Lee uses Korean papers collectively known as hanji, which like washi, identifies the country in the first syllable of these terms (han for Korea and wa for Japan, respectively) and the second syllable of each meaning “paper” (ji and shi). That is, these paper classifications encompass an entire culture in their naming.
That there is a name for paper made in Korea embodying the culture gives us another perspective on the exhibition’s title “Tethered.” More comprehensively known as a culture bearer of hanji, Lee has a self-pronounced obsession with the material. At an outstanding talk delivered on March 14 at BIMA, Lee unfurled her roles as artist, apprentice, advocate, ambassador, maker, mentor, instructor, historian, preservationist and researcher of hanji. Paper tethers her as her favored artistic medium; to her career and livelihood; to her Korean heritage; to Korea’s distinctive papermaking techniques and varieties; and to Nature that provides fibers to enable resilient sheets, botanicals, such as Hibiscus manihot, used to bind the fibers, and the plentiful cold water needed complete the process.
The magnetism between Lee and hanji ignited when a curator at Oberlin College’s Allen Memorial Art Museum identified a Chinese painting as likely to be on hanji. This experience compelled her to go to Korea to study the language; later she returned on two Fulbright fellowships for hanji research. As Lee learned to create paper sheets, she began to work with traditional Korean papermakers. And as she pursued every path to the craft, she discovered she “wanted to save everything” about it.
Initially one papermaker didn’t think highly of Lee: she didn’t appear to have the physical stamina necessary for the steps of the papermaking process; why should the artisan invest in a young American if she was going to leave; and how could he make a living if he turned all his skills over to her. Lee surmises she was easy to underestimate. Once the paper artisan observed how serious she was, he was eager to share everything he knew.
At the closing of Lee’s talk, she confessed, “I’ve always said I’ll use hanji until it’s no longer interesting to me, but it continues to offer new possibilities.” The impressive 70 objects in the BIMA exhibition reveal her expansiveness of hanji’s possibilities, a facet of Lee’s work that curator Erin Zona aimed to convey. Lee’s artists’ books, one as small as a square of chocolate, reveal not only a multiplicity of techniques but also manifestations of Lee’s responses to and perspective on passages in life.
Lee considers her “Peculiar and Commonplace” (2018) book the best she’s ever made. “A fake dressmaking manual,” as the artist describes it, the book is a manual—of sorts—where she records quotes that explore the practice and process of creation combined with poetic instructions on how to make a dress. The pages appear like leaves of an album displaying paper and textile swatches, and later a finished paper dress, though to appreciate this book’s layers calls for a viewing of it at BIMA.
For Lee’s more modest yet resounding artists’ book “Trip,” about the size of a passport, she twists hanji strips dyed indigo and persimmon red and knits the paper threads into the form of a book. On a page split by the colored threads, the top being of blue knit and the lower half of red, she adheres a tiny letterpress slip with the phrase, “What looked like clear air” atop the blue portion. On the lower red knit, another slip completes the sentence, “is now an opaque window keeping me out of my own mind.” While personal interpretations of this object are infinite, Lee reveals that “Trip” holds her story of perimenopause, formed as a metaphor for the last phase of menstruation when memory is faltering, falling through the knitted spaces and gaps.
Twisted paper becomes thread which transforms into twining, a craft within craft within a craft. Paper sheets shift from two dimensions into three, creating paper sculptures resembling every-day things in Korean life: kettle, and vessel in a classical shape that might wear a celadon glaze in its ceramic form. A pair of gourds, which once served as portable receptacles to hold water or spirits, stands pertly as a 3-D still life in a stunning midnight blue achieved through indigo, persimmon and walnut dyes.
Lee’s organic palette of dyes also includes marigold and persimmon through a process identified in Japanese as kakishibu wherein unripe fruit is crushed and left to ferment, producing shades of brown that deepen with exposure to oxygen and light. While the papers and their natural colors appear too precious and dainty to touch, Lee adds notes she’s jotted down or in the script of her own hand as well as letterpress in a nostalgic typewriter font. These details are subtle reminders that Lee’s captivating paper creations are texts meant to be read and pondered.
Lee is an ambassador not only to hanji and artists’ books but one between Korea and the rest of the world too. “Tethered” opens Lee’s closet of hanbok that she has folded and stitched into the panels of this traditional Korean dress, and from distinctive papers that reveal the splendor of hanbok textile patterns. In a different way, she is a bridge to students of Korean heritage who are frequent applicants to her summer workshops. Cultural discovery may also be transmitted through Lee’s deep investment in her students who only total 8 per year in her Oberlin studio; Lee has noted this might be a neo-Confucian practice ingrained in her.
More generally, Lee’s show celebrates a dedicated interest of BIMA. Unlike most museums where artists’ books are peripheral, BIMA features an intimate wood-paneled and well-lit gallery that holds three artists’ books exhibitions over the course of every year. Zona, also BIMA’S Curator of the Cynthia Sears Artists’ Books Collection, makes selections from its more than 4,000-objects. (Sears herself is not only an avid collector of arts and crafts, but also a 25-year Bainbridge resident and catalyst for the creation of BIMA in 2013.) The recurring exhibition “What Is An Artists’ Book?” in the museum’s first-floor Orientation Gallery additionally fosters a greater understanding of the myriad arts and techniques of these objects.
Lee’s work comprises 35 objects in the Sears collection, among the most of any artist. This explains why several of the objects included in “Tethered” come from BIMA’s own collection. The others originate from the artist’s personal work. Lee explains she keeps them hung around her studio to inform her next creation and continue to enrich the story she is telling about hanji and her deep connection to it.
Will hanji making endure? People often ask this of Lee. She wonders why people don’t care as she does about ensuring this knowledge isn’t lost. She sees hanji holistically, moreover, where specialized papermaking tools are also critical if hand papermaking is to survive. The domains of agriculture, scholarship, publishing and government, too, must press for the preservation of traditional industries.
Paper, so fundamental to human culture, is a collaboration of human hands working Nature’s elements of wood and water. Paper emerges from this process as its own creature, and today, Aimee Lee’s attention is on the hanji itself to guide her own handwork and write the next pages of her narrative.
“Tethered” runs until June 14th at the Bainbridge Island Art Museum (BIMA).
See also:
https://www.biartmuseum.org/exhibitions/aimee-lee-tethered/
https://www.biartmuseum.org/artists-book-collection/
