Fiber Art Takes Center Stage at Lee ShinJa’s Beautiful Retrospective

Fiber art, particularly by nonagenarian women, continues to have a moment. An exhibition of works by 93-year-old Olga de Amaral runs until mid-October at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Across the country, “Lee ShinJa: Drawing With Thread” just bowed at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in California, the first North American retrospective of the South Korean artist, who turns 95 this month. “If I were to name what inspires me,” ShinJa said in an interview last year, “it would be fiber itself.” But there have been other influences, notably, the sunrises she would see on morning walks as a young girl with her dad in Uljin, where she was born (she lives in Seoul now), and a scarcity of materials that resulted from the Korean War.

The former often informed the color palette of ShinJa’s tapestries, many of them large-scale, such as the more than 6-foot-tall Spirit of Mountain, which BAMPFA recently acquired and is among the 38 fiber works she produced between 1958 and 2007 on view. The latter made her a pioneer of the reuse of the found and discarded, incorporating such unconventional art materials at the time as old grain sacks, mosquito netting, and yarn from secondhand sweaters. Accompanying her fiber pieces are rarely shown woven maquettes and preparatory sketches, providing a unique glimpse into the development of ShinJa’s groundbreaking practice.