Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Lee has held solo exhibitions including 《Making the Ended Road》 (Space Beam, Incheon, 2025), 《Fragile City》 (Art Space Bullmoji, Incheon, 2023), 《From My Flowerpot》 (Incheon Seo-gu Culture & Arts Center, Incheon, 2022), and 《Unrooted》 (Cheongna Blue Nova Hall, Incheon, 2022).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Lee has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Glass: Beyond the Window》 (Gallery Meilan, Seoul, 2025), 《Pieces of Us》 (Doing Art Gallery, Seoul, 2024), 《Boogie Woogie Museum》 (Ulsan Museum of Art, Ulsan, 2023), 《Foot of the Perpendicular》 (Gallery aHsh, Paju, 2020), and the 《Craft Competition: Cheongju International Craft Biennale》 (Cheongju International Craft Biennale, Cheongju, 2019).

Residencies (Selected)

Lee has been selected for a number of residency programs, including New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum (Taiwan, 2026), Incheon Art Platform (Incheon, 2025), and Art Naru Residency (Incheon, 2024).

Collections (Selected)

Lee’s works are held in the collections of Yanggu Porcelain Museum and the Cheongju International Craft Biennale, among others.

Originality & Identity

Based on feminist reflections on primordial space and identity, Soyoung Lee has explored through sculpture and installation where the subject takes root and within what kinds of relationships it is formed. In her early solo exhibition 《Return to Chora》(Kimsechoong Museum, 2019), the artist used the feminine space of “chora” to reveal that identity is not fixed, but is instead deconstructed and generated again.

Works from this period imagine a primordial space before the subject separates from the other, through forms reminiscent of umbilical cords, navels, and a mother’s breasts. For Lee, femininity is not a specific image or biological condition, but a way of thinking for rewriting existing language and social structures.
 
This interest expands into the relationship between the individual, community, and place in 《Belly Gap _ Record of Place》(CoSMo40, 2020). Through the bodily sign of the “navel,” the artist deals with traces of existence that originate from another but remain after separation. At a time when the sense of community implied by “we” can no longer be maintained as a solid sameness, Lee examines through sculpture the subtle distances and gaps between the city, community, and individual identity.

Later, in 《Unrooted》(Cheongna Blue Nova Hall, 2022) and 《From My Flowerpot》(Incheon Seo-gu Culture & Arts Center Art Gallery, 2022), she addresses questions of rootedness and movement through the medium of the flowerpot. Unrooted Pots_1(2021) and Unrooted_2(2021) show that the ground of existence is not a fixed land, but a place that can be chosen, moved, and placed again.
 
After 2023, the artist’s questions move toward the city, disappearance, and the time of sculpture in formation. In the solo exhibition 《Fragile City》(Art Space Bullmoji, 2023), Lee expressed the structures of cities that collapse and are rebuilt within cycles of redevelopment and circulation through the formation and collapse of clay. Fragile City 1(2023), Fragile City 2(2023), and Fragile City 3(2024) reveal that cities and human lives are not situated on stable foundations, but exist within ongoing processes of movement, dismantling, and reconstruction.

In 《Making the Ended Road》(Space Beam, 2025), she explores threshold spaces in Incheon, such as the ends of roads, ports, embankments, and tidal flats, returning the spatial image of the “ended road” to a repeated process of rebuilding and breaking. Walking on Mudflats(2024) is a work that captures vanishing traces and the time just before formation through the movements of the body, clay, and rising tide on the mudflats.

Style & Contents

Soyoung Lee expands the scope of sculpture by combining clay, stoneware, porcelain, wood, oak, tanks, video, digital prints, and performative actions. Rather than focusing on sculpture as a finished form, the artist pays attention to processes in which material and body come into contact and friction, and forms come into being or disappear.

In 《Return to Chora》, clay was used as a material that holds feminine space and primordial sensation, while in 《Belly Gap _ Record of Place》, the navel as a bodily trace was placed within space to explore the relationship between place and community. The sculptures from this period are abstract yet bodily, giving form to sensations of contact, separation, distance, and relation rather than explaining a specific narrative.
 
The flowerpot that appears in 《From My Flowerpot》 is an important form that concretizes the artist’s subject through an everyday object. A flowerpot is an object that allows plants to move and take root elsewhere, and it becomes a device for resetting the coordinates of existence. Lee did not merely present the flowerpots in the exhibition space; she distributed them to people from various backgrounds and documented them through photographs as they entered each person’s living space.

Through this process, sculpture moves beyond the fixed exhibition object and enters other people’s lives, while the place of the work also disperses across multiple lived worlds rather than remaining in a single space. This process shows how subject, place, object, and relationship change together.
 
In 《Fragile City》 and 《Making the Ended Road》, the materiality of clay becomes more clearly central to the work. The artist makes bricks or architectural elements from clay, then repeatedly breaks them apart and returns them to their original state.

Here, sculpture exists not as a solid result, but as a trace of time in which things collapse and gather again. In Fragile City 2, white clay and an acrylic tank become devices that reveal the fragility and circulation of the city, while Let Me Go Somewhere(2023) gives sculptural form to the sensations of life, space, and movement through stoneware.

In 《Making the Ended Road》, Lee collects architectural elements from landscapes and objects found in the threshold zones of Incheon, and reveals movements before form through the repeated acts of making, breaking, and rebuilding sculpture. In her work, cracking, erosion, collapse, and recombination are not merely physical changes, but the very content of the work.

Topography & Continuity

Soyoung Lee makes ceramic works centered on the temporality, tactility, and performativity of clay. She does not use clay merely as a material for fixing form, but as a medium that records the movements of body, place, and relationship.

While many artists working with similar media often focus on the materiality of ceramics or sculptural completion, Lee thinks through the fluidity of identity and place by tracing how clay dries, cracks, breaks apart, and gathers again. Her sculptures are less completed objects than scenes of time in which existence is formed, dispersed, and connected again.
 
Lee has expanded her concerns from feminine space and the body toward community and place, rootedness and movement, the fragility of the city, and threshold spaces. The artist began with the primordial condition of the subject and the deconstruction of identity, then extended the gap between “we” and “I” into questions of the city and community. She has also proposed the possibility of rootedness beyond fixed place, while connecting the instability of urban life with the temporality of sculpture.
 
Through this trajectory, Lee has developed sculpture not as a solid form, but as a language for dealing with states of formation and traces of disappearance. The contexts in which the boundaries, movements, and regional landscapes of specific places take root in Lee’s work are gradually expanding. Her practice will continue to record traces of existence by moving between clay and body, place and movement, sculpture and performance.