Sun Ju Lee, 'Yarns on Yarns'

Sun Ju Lee’s practice explores the intersection of place, situation, and transformation through intermedial artworks. Drawing on shadows captured in photographs, she reimagines these fleeting traces through layered processes involving print, drawing, glass, and textiles. The outcomes blur the boundary between the real and the reinterpreted, the sensed and the constructed. Her approach is nomadic and research-based, often developed through residencies and field projects. Immersive encounters with each place guide her material choices and making processes. In gathering resonant materials and engaging with context- specific techniques, she cultivates new ways of sensing, mapping, and articulating spatial experience.  

Her ongoing project, a Practiced Place, reflects this methodology. It explores the relationship between lived experience and constructed memory, weaving narratives of place through tactile forms. Whether working with the transparency of glass or the layering of textiles, Lee’s practice invites viewers to consider how we inhabit place physically, emotionally, and imaginatively and how the ephemeral can be reactivated through material form. 

 Sun Ju Lee is a London-based artist working across drawing, printmaking, glass, and textiles. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the Royal Academy of Arts (London), Kunstpalast (Düsseldorf), National Glass Centre (Sunderland), Cité internationale des arts (Paris), and Seoul Olympic Museum of Art (Seoul). Since 2012, She has held four solo exhibitions and will present a solo exhibition at The Muse at 269 in October 2025. Her practice is shaped by residencies and projects, supported by Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Arts Council England, a-n Artist Bursaries, the   Arts & Humanities Research Council, and Arts Council Korea. Lee’s awards include the Jutta Cuny-Franz Foundation Talent Award, the National Glass Centre Residency Award, the Create Space London commission, and the Tim and Belinda Mara Award. Her work is part of the permanent collections at the Glasmuseum Hentrich, the National Glass Centre, and the Royal College of Art. She earned her MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art in 2010 and a practice-led PhD at the University of Leeds in 2022.