This summer, Ikon Gallery in Birmingham unveils SPAN, the first UK solo exhibition by Korean-French artist Seulgi Lee. Lee offers a multifaceted exploration of form, language and storytelling. She is known for her deft integration of conceptual art with traditional craft practices, and her vibrant, participatory works encourage viewers to consider the span of human experience – measured not only in distance but in metaphor, culture and touch. Born in Seoul in 1972, Lee has lived in Paris since 1992. After graduating from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, she founded the collaborative platform PARIS PROJECT ROOM and has since built a distinctive international practice. Her work has featured in significant exhibitions including La Triennale – Intense Proximité at Palais de Tokyo (2012), the 10th Gwangju Biennale (2014), and most recently, the 17th Lyon Biennale (2024). Notable solo shows include SLOW WATER at Incheon Art Platform (2021) and SAMSAM at Gallery Hyundai, Seoul (2024), reflecting her continous dialogue between inherited materials and contemporary concerns.
At Ikon, Lee brings together several of her signature series, as well as new commissions that draw on Birmingham’s own histories of craft and trade. The exhibition’s title, SPAN, references the ancient measure – the distance between thumb and little finger – and becomes a metaphor for the relational: “To shift the point of view from me to you, from you to them, while extending our thumb and baby finger. A SPAN,” the artist says. Amongst the new works is SIX PENCE (2025), developed in collaboration with the School of Jewellery at Birmingham City University. This intimate wall installation references the Victorian-era mother-of-pearl button trade, a delicate local craft that made beauty accessible to all. For Lee, these tiny objects are more than historical curios; they become poetic fragments, “stars walking on clothes.”
The Blanket Project U (2014–ongoing) exemplifies Lee’s practice of blending oral tradition with material form. Working with Nubi artisans from Tongyeong, South Korea, Lee transforms hand-sewn, line-by-line quilted blankets into abstract visual proverbs. These geometric compositions are more than textiles; they are tactile idioms, each embedded with linguistic nuance. Two new additions – U: A Piece of Cake = Easy to Get Rid Ofand U: 감쪽같다 Like a Kaki = As If By Magic (both 2025) – reflect Lee’s translation of British idioms into Korean quilt forms, highlighting her ongoing interest in how meaning shifts across languages.
Furthering this exploration of vernacular knowledge is W (2017–18), a series of woven palm-leaf baskets created in collaboration with female artisans in Santa María Ixcatlán, Mexico. These anthropomorphic objects sit atop slender armatures, embodying both the regional landscape and fragments of oral storytelling. One basket, W / Sala si tundu tsude chitjiũ ju wa, The madman has a broken blue (green) nose (2017), evokes a torso with an absent base, a poetic reflection on memory. Another, Young girl with neat hair, suggests tightly bound buns, a gesture toward tradition and femininity. Lee’s project is an act of preservation, as there are only four remaining speakers of the village’s native Ixcatec language.
The exhibition’s namesake work, SPAN (2025), is realised through collaboration with Suyeon Kim, a master of dancheong – the traditional Korean art of architectural painting. Here, the ornate patterns are distilled into a contemporary composition, reimagined as a series of brightly coloured lines. In SLOW WATER (2022), this chromatic language extends into an elevated floor installation made from interlocking wooden slats, inspired by Munsal, the latticework found in Korean architecture. The vivid palette and shifting perspectives invite movement, echoing the layered rhythms of oral storytelling and communal labour.
Sound weaves through the exhibition as well. NANANI GONG-AL (2021), an audio work created with gagok singer Minhee Park, brings together women’s songs from Korea and Japan. The piece fuses the Gong-Al song, which playfully describes the body after intimacy, with the Akita Ondo from Japan’s Akita Prefecture. Originally sung while rope-making before sea work, the piece reveals the transformation of language through song, repetition, and time.
Lee’s presence at Ikon extends beyond the gallery walls. As part of Thread the Loom, a concurrent residency programme, she will work on-site with Midlands-based artists using an AVL Studio Dobby loom. This initiative opens a space for live conversation and shared making, bridging geographies and practices. Throughout SPAN, Seulgi Lee guides us through a choreography of touch, form, and meaning. Her works move fluidly between cultures – from the idioms of the UK and Korea to the vanishing languages of rural Mexico – always returning to the intimate: a hand’s width, a thread’s direction, a remembered story. “With this new exhibition,” Lee says, “I’m focusing on figuring out a methodology for measuring between things, ways of working with them, histories and collective stories.”
Lee expands the notion of connection through her attention to material and metaphor, bridging the spaces between past and present, here and elsewhere. In an era where craft risks being reduced to fetishism or nostalgia, SPAN offers a living, breathing continuum. The span is not a fixed length but an invitation: to reach, relate and remember. This exhibition stands as a testament to Ikon Gallery’s ongoing commitment to presenting exhibitions that are both intellectually rigorous and deeply attuned to the poetics of material and place. Through thoughtful curatorial decisions, Lee’s practice unfolds with clarity and resonance – each work not only meant to be seen but to be felt, traced and interpreted. The exhibition’s strength lies in the calibration of context and form, aligning global narratives with the local histories of Birmingham. By bringing together these layered articulations of language, craft and memory, SPAN embodies the kind of vision that continues to define Ikon’s programme – one that values the slow unfolding of meaning.
Seulgi Lee: SPAN is at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 25 June – 7 September: ikon-gallery.org
Words: Anna Müller
Image credits:
1.Seulgi Lee SLOW WATER Exhibition view, Incheon Art Platform (2021) Image courtesy the artist and Incheon Art Platform.
2.Seulgi Lee SLOW WATER(2022)6 meters, in Fraxinus, alias ash, and gouach Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Jousse Entreprise Paris (Seulgi Lee © ADAGP Paris 2025)
3.Seulgi Lee View of the exhibition Born A Woman at Suwon Museum of Art(2020). (Seulgi Lee © ADAGP Paris 2025)From left to right U:A pile pf eggs = A tricky situation(2018) Courtesy Gallery Hyundai U:Alone in bed = Waiting for her husband for long (2018) Courtesy Gallery Hyundai U:My three-foot nose = I’m too ground down to help anyone else (2018) Courtesy Gallery Hyundai U:A perfect spear and a perfect shield = Contradiction(2020) Courtesy Gallery Hyundai U:Sheep’s intestines folded nine times = A hard time (2020) Production by Suwon Museum Courtesy Gallery Hyundai.
4.Seulgi Lee SLOW WATER(2022) 6 meters, in Fraxinus, alias ash, and gouach Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Jousse Entreprise Paris(Seulgi Lee © ADAGP Paris 2025)
