photo by Kate Rolston
SAMMY SEUNG-MIN LEE
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Sammy Seung-min Lee explores sculpture, bookbinding, and installation in her interdisciplinary practice. Rooted in a diasporic perspective shaped by migration and bicultural identity, her work explores how cultural traditions persist, adapt, and hybridize across time and place. Using hanji (Korean mulberry paper) and other found materials, Lee transforms traditional craft techniques into sculptural forms that examine themes of identity, displacement, and resilience.
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Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Denver Botanic Gardens (2022), Emmanuel Art Gallery (Denver, 2021) and Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (2014), with an upcoming solo at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in 2026. She has participated in residencies at the Studios at MASS MoCA, Anderson Ranch, and RedLine Contemporary Art Center, among others. Notable highlights include a performative collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma during his Bach Project tour in 2018.
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Lee is a recipient of a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Fellowship (2023–24), fellowships from Ewha Womans University (2024–26), and Colorado Creative Industries. She is the founder and director of Collective SML | k, a Denver-based project space supporting Asian and Asian American artists through residencies and community programs.
STATEMENT
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“What use is three bushels of beads if none of them are threaded?” This Korean proverb guides my practice: meaning emerges through connection and transformation. Like beads, fragments—memories, found objects, papers—I reconfigure them into sculptural forms, installations, and books that explore belonging, migration, and cultural memory.
I manipulate hanji into a leather-like “paper-skin” through soaking, layering, pounding, and binding, transforming it into both a shield and a membrane. This hybrid material becomes a vessel for navigating thresholds between past and present, body and place, assimilation and resilience.
My installations invite physical interaction, while my artist books offer an intimate, hand-held encounter. Both aim to create spaces for shared narratives—where personal histories and communal stories intertwine. In the tactile surface of “paper-skin,” I seek to hold the vulnerability and strength of a life lived between worlds.