Ke-Sook Lee (courtesy of Charles Lee)
A petite dynamo, devoted to honoring women’s dreams and struggles in delicate artworks rooted in the domestic realm
She was petite, ethereal and determined. And despite cultural and family restraints, she became an extraordinary international artist, continents away from her country of origin. Her aesthetic evolution took place in Kansas City.
Ke-Sook Lee was born in Seoul, Korea, in 1941. When she was nine, war broke out in Korea, a horror that stayed with her and later influenced her art. Although she wanted to be a painter, her mother insisted she study something practical. After receiving a degree in Applied Art from Seoul National University in 1963 Lee worked as a graphic design artist at a pharmaceutical company.
In 1964 she moved to Kansas City with her husband, Dr. Kyo Rak Lee. While raising two young sons, learning English and maintaining a home, she realized her dream of becoming a fine artist by attending the Kansas City Art Institute. She received her BFA in painting in 1982, in her early 40s.
Before the Art Institute, Lee’s work consisted of traditional, mostly figurative paintings. She made radical changes in her art as she attended KCAI. Her oldest son, Charles, recalls:
“Her visual language kept evolving while at the Art Institute; her eyes and mind opened up. She studied poetry, read Nietzsche, and although shy she engaged in serious conversations with her professors. It took real courage for her to listen to critiques. And real heart.
“Her iconography evolved as she began referencing her life as a woman. She adopted calligraphy ink and began making her own paper. She was driven, hungry, and as an older student she had a different kind of drive. Her art became abstract; she worked very hard to distill her message.
“The first time she had to give a talk she was petrified; at the end of her life, she had no trouble jumping full-throated into a Zoom call with ten other people.”
Even before Lee graduated, Barbara Haskell, chief curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, awarded Lee a purchase award in the 1981 Mid-Four Annual Exhibition at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
Lee also began writing poetry, deliberately composing in her own imperfect, minimalist English, which lent a whimsical grace and honesty to her comments.
Lee often combined her visual art and poems, and in both she alluded, abstractly, to her life growing up in Korea, where women were mostly confined inside their homes to household duties. As a child, with her grandmother and other women, she practiced embroidery — one of the few art forms in which women were allowed to express themselves. Much of her iconography was derived from her informed response to those memories. She used discarded fabrics such as doilies and handkerchiefs made by unknown women for her canvases and referred to her stitched and embroidered markings on them as her “drawing.” The holes she created in her artworks denoted the pinpoints with which her mother punctured the rice paper windows of their home so they could see outdoors; the beautiful shades of blue Lee created suggested the skies outside.
The spidery figures Lee painted on many of her artworks were symbols for all the arms women needed to do everything required of them. Her collaged pieces often included parts of crocheted or embroidered fabrics that she loved (by unknown makers) and that she pieced onto or inside layered works, reflecting the hidden life of so many women.
As Lee’s confidence grew so did her artwork. She created large-scale installations of giant aprons or rolls of thread tumbling off walls and onto the floor. Simultaneously fragile, soulful and monumental, they also showed Lee’s hard-won confidence and wit.
Her son John often helped her mount these large-scale exhibits.
Lee’s art grew in recognition, first in the Kansas City region with numerous honors including the Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award and an individual artist fellowship from the Kansas Arts Commission. Besides multiple gallery and university exhibitions, her work was also shown at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Salina Art Center, the Kansas City Jewish Museum at the Epsten Gallery, and the Spencer Museum of Art. The latter bought Lee’s work “Green Hammock,” a textile work created from army nurses’ uniforms, inspired by her wartime memories.
Along with regular group and one-person shows at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Massachusetts and Wisconsin, Lee’s textile pieces were installed in such prestigious exhibits as “Pricked: Extreme Embroidery” at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, California. Her art was also shown in France, in the Florence Biennale in Italy, and in Seoul and other cities throughout her native Korea.
In the last year of her life, struggling with pancreatic cancer, Lee created “Ode to Seed,” a book on handmade rice paper with hand-stitched thread and fiber remnants from previous work. It included her writings. (Several of its pages were reproduced in the January/February 2025 issue of KC Studio.) Most of the “Ode to Seed” pages were subsequently published as a hardcover book. Essentially a memoir, in her last work Lee takes us on a magical, imaginary walk through the poetically distilled cycles of her life.
A wonderful gardener, Lee referred to herself as “a seed” that “landed on earth.” This seed sleeps and is awakened by the light. It is blown about and is lonely but also finds freedom. There are storm clouds but ultimately it grows.
In 2013 Ke-Sook and her husband moved to Berkeley, California, to be with their two sons.
Ke-Sook Lee chose to be buried in Johnson County, Kansas, where she raised her family. “After all,” Charles Lee said, “she was a Kansas City artist.”
