Jungin Lee

Jungin Lee (b. 1985, Gwangju, South Korea) is an artist working across furniture, sculpture and material research. Based between Seoul and Paju, her practice has developed through a sustained investigation into materials and the ways their physical properties can be transformed through making.

Lee studied Woodworking and Furniture Design at Hongik University in Seoul, where working directly with timber gave her an understanding of furniture through full-scale construction. She later completed an MA in Design Products at the Royal College of Art in London, where her attention began to shift from furniture-making itself towards a broader exploration of materials and process.

Her early Frozen project emerged from this period and was first presented at the Royal College of Art in 2012. Developed through experiments combining industrial methods with hand-making, the series explored folded forms and materials including Jesmonite, establishing an approach in which process and material behaviour could determine the final object. The work subsequently appeared at Dutch Design Week, Milan Design Week and London Design Festival, as well as exhibitions and fairs in Europe and Korea.

In recent years, Lee’s practice has centred increasingly on hanji, traditional Korean paper made from mulberry fibre. Although familiar to her from childhood, her understanding of the material changed after witnessing the labour involved in its traditional production and, later, learning a Korean mounting process while making a traditional book. Research into historic hanji objects, including its former use in armour, revealed structural possibilities far removed from the material’s conventional association with a thin sheet of paper.

Lee began experimenting with transforming hanji into three-dimensional, load-bearing forms while retaining the softness, warmth and subtle tonal variation she values in the paper itself. Her current works are constructed through the repeated layering of hanji with flour paste over temporary structures that are subsequently removed, leaving hollow forms built entirely from paper. More than one hundred layers may be required before a work achieves the strength, volume and continuity she is seeking.

Motivated by environmental concerns and the experience of motherhood, Lee’s investigation of hanji also reflects a wider consideration of materials, consumption and the ways objects are made. She describes hanji as a material from the past that she sees simultaneously as a material for the future: made from natural fibres, capable of considerable longevity, yet ultimately able to return naturally to the earth. This investigation led to A Soft Landscape (2024), selected as a finalist for the 2025 LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize. Her work has been exhibited internationally across Europe and Asia.

Across this evolution, a consistent concern has remained: discovering what a material is capable of becoming. Lee describes each new work as another problem to solve rather than the repetition of an established formula. Her studio functions as a place of continual experimentation, where knowledge accumulates through the physical experience of making and where the limits of material, structure and form remain deliberately open.