Denver-based artist Sammy Lee makes highly portable sculptures from paper, but a longing for home is embedded in her materials.
Denver, Colorado | studiosmlk.com | @sammy_seungmin_lee
At first blush, Korean-born and Denver-based artist Sammy Lee’s series Arrived (2016-ongoing) appears to reference anything but the local. Sheltered, Arrived (2023), a collection of eighty suitcases wrapped in paper skins, suggests an engagement with nomadic, global, and diasporic concerns. Her artwork Innards 3 (2023), composed of suitcase compartments layered in paper skins, articulates a similar concern.
But embedded in this project is also a longing for home, rootedness, and a sense of belonging. When filtered through this lens, Sheltered, Arrived does not suggest an urge to alight, but rather a desire to arrive. Lee forwards this reading of her practice when she notes that “as a first-generation immigrant who navigated a nomadic youth, my work serves as an exploration of a sense of home.
While we often conceptualize home as a particular place or space, Lee’s MAMABOT-Ms. Daegu(2020) tacitly argues that home can also be understood as a person, a community, or the memory of them. The artwork consists of various framed photographs shaped into a robotic humanoid, then covered in paper skins. Holistically, the piece references a vintage imagination of the automaton. But upon closer inspection, glimpses of the obscured photographs come into view. These partially revealed images argue for the importance of intimate human connection as the underlying framework for all our technologic advancements.
Whether tied to person or place, real or imagined, Lee’s search for home maintains an indebtedness to her use of sculpted paper. After soaking hanji (Korean mulberry paper) in water, the artist engages in “the laborious process of… squeezing, kneading, and pounding layers of paper” into form. Her fidelity to paper transforms itself into a certain type of home—a material intimacy that both breeds and bears within it a familiarity, comfort, and support through extended, tactile engagement. Just as the contents of the artist’s work explore the concept of home, her chosen material becomes the physical embodiment of it.
