Artist Jaeok Lee immigrated from her home in Nak Won Dong, in the heart of Seoul, to the United States in 1974. Now based in Sudbury, 71-year-old Lee has a home and studio atop a hill — a pocket of enchantment. The land bursts with rare flowers and is populated with chipmunks living among deer; punctuating the property are ceramic beoksu — guardian posts — and sotdae — poles topped with birds — rising like guardians. The garden perpetually invites birds and insects, reviving senses often dulled in Boston’s urban pace.

I visited Lee to discuss her debut solo exhibition at Boston Sculptors Gallery, “Ties That Bind,” which draws from ancient Korean traditions to explore regeneration, oppression, and the everyday burdens women carry. But the trip was much more. Visiting her home, in fact, felt like being teleported to the Korean countryside.

Stepping into her studio — where she creates ceramics, monoprints, and ink drawings — is like entering another world. Ornate wooden furniture, aged and intricate, anchors the space. Many of the pieces traveled from Korea, stewarded by Lee herself. One standout is an apothecary chest — its many drawers filled with porcelain figurines inspired by plants. Each delicate piece was crafted during a time when Lee was bedridden, her body failing her in ways even doctors could not explain.

“My body lost its functions to the point it was hard to even open my eyes,” she recalls. “When I could get up, I’d go outside to pick up something small, like a seed, flower, or a fruit, and muster my remaining energy to create small porcelain figurines.”

This became Each Seed a New Life. Her deeply personal, therapeutic art practice produced an entire cabinet of handmade pieces, born from illness, uncertainty, and hope.

“These porcelains were like my medicine,” Lee explains. She does not beautify suffering. She displays it plainly, inviting the viewer to witness a period marked by pain that can’t be located, and a future that is suspended.

As a young woman, she had a feeling that she might not live a long life. She didn’t think she’d live beyond 60. Having outlived her own expectations, she contemplates death and negotiates with mortality with a deep fascination in end-of-life care and death-related customs. Pain, grief, and death are not avoided, but rather metabolized through her art. Her artwork brings the audience closer to the borders between this world (yiseung) and that world (jeoseung). Death is not an end in Lee’s work but a fertile and generative realm. Her installations evoke a poetics of death that are deeply Korean, yet universally resonant. Her art suggests that by sitting with death — by preparing for it, imagining it, and materializing it — we become more fully alive.

Memory — both personal and collective — is central to her practice. Her ceramic beoksu resemble porous rock, embodying her ancestors and other important figures in her life, including her late dog, Dory. One of her most powerful works depicts her mother carrying her older sister across the cold Han River during the Korean War, a journey that ended with the death of her infant sibling — a rarely told family trauma materialized in clay.

Having witnessed and planned the funerals of both her parents, two decades apart, Lee has also turned her attention to the vanishing rituals of Korean traditional funerals. “For my father’s funeral 20 years ago, we still had some of the old rites. But by my mother’s time, they were gone. Everything was arranged by the hospital. I felt how fast a culture can disappear.”

One such disappearing tradition is the sangyeo – a bier used to carry the deceased.

“Sangyeo can be extremely colorful and ornate,” she says. “They are coarse, not delicate, because they were built by village people, not professionals. Some families owned them like heirlooms, but poorer communities would build and share them when someone died.”

Lee’s fascination with funeral traditions, combined with her personal proximity with mortality and death, continues to fuel her ongoing body of work, an exploration of Korean funeral tradition and death-related customs.

Reflecting these sensibilities is the central installation of “The Ties that Bind,” an exhibition honoring four generations of women in Lee’s family, while speaking to the wider experience of first-generation immigrants. At its center, she erects five sotdae – tall wooden poles wrapped in silk fabrics inherited from her mother, once part of a crumbling picket fence. Scattered around are oversized ceramic thimbles (golmu), tools used by her foremothers. Lee sees golmu not only as artifacts of domesticity but also as vessels of care, protection, and creativity. Red beans (pat), known to ward off evil, are spread throughout the space, inviting the audience into Lee’s cosmology of spiritual safeguarding.

Through her late-blooming yet inexhaustible practice, she honors not only her mother but generations of women whose creativity and artistry were never recognized as art. In Lee’s world, the ordinary becomes sacred. The broken becomes seed. Protection takes shape in clay, silk, and thread.

She draws inspiration from mudang, Korean shamans who pass down spiritual gifts through generations. “They were mistreated and heavily stigmatized in Korean society,” she says. “Some suffered physical and mental symptoms when they denied their destiny. I see them as multimedia artists and stewards of the cultural roots in shamanic and folk culture. I am enraged by the Western and Christian influenced attempts that try to erase them, stigmatizing shamanic culture as backward and superstitious.”
Though Lee does not claim spiritual powers herself, she sees her role as adjacent: to preserve, honor, and extend these cultural practices through art.

Her career as an artist has been non-linear. Health challenges, raising a family, and running a clothing business for over a decade delayed and redirected her practice. She still mourns the period when she couldn’t enroll in a Master of Fine Arts program due to her health. She also looks back at the choices she made during her recovery, such as living in spiritually charged Jiri Mountain, as key opportunities which motivated her to continue practicing art.

Lee’s work is a reclamation of what has been lost, overlooked, or deemed unworthy of preservation. Through her, ancient practices speak again, not as relics, but as living, breathing gestures of care, grief, and protection.

“I may not be a mudang,” she says, “but I hope to carry forward their spirit.”

“Jaeok Lee: The Ties That Bind” runs concurrently with “Hillel O’Leary: Unmanned Vessel” June 12 – July 13 at the Boston Sculptors Gallery; Reception & Artist’s Talk is Sunday, June 15, 2 – 5 p.m.