A Korean Fiber Artist’s Journey to Weave Culture Into International Acclaim
From Seoul to Edinburgh: A Korean Fiber Artist’s Journey to Weave Culture Into International Acclaim
In a sunlit studio in Edinburgh’s Leith neighborhood, Kim Ji-Yeon sits cross-legged on the floor, her hands moving deftly as she layers sheets of hanji—traditional Korean mulberry paper—with strands of Scottish wool. The piece she’s working on, titled “Bridges of Paper and Wool,” blends the delicate translucency of hanji (a material used in Korean art for centuries) with the thick, earthy texture of wool sourced from the Scottish Highlands. At 40, this Korean fiber artist has become a rising star in the UK’s contemporary art scene, with her work exhibited in London’s Tate Modern, Edinburgh’s National Galleries, and galleries across Europe. But her path to success was marked by rejections, self-doubt, and the challenge of proving that “craft” (often dismissed as “non-serious art”) could be a powerful form of cultural storytelling. For Ji-Yeon, art isn’t just about creating beauty—it’s about stitching together her Korean heritage and Scottish home into something that speaks to people across borders.
A Childhood Stitched in Hanji
Ji-Yeon grew up in Seoul, where her grandmother taught her to work with hanji at the age of 7. “Every weekend, we’d sit on her porch, tearing mulberry bark, boiling it, and pressing it into paper,” she recalls. “She told me hanji isn’t just paper—it’s alive. It breathes, it ages, it holds memories.” Her grandmother used hanji to make everything from fans and lanterns to traditional jeogori (Korean jackets), and Ji-Yeon quickly fell in love with its versatility. By her teens, she was experimenting with mixing hanji with other materials—silk, cotton, even old fabric scraps from her mother’s sewing box—and selling small art pieces at Seoul’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza.
After studying fiber art at Seoul National University, Ji-Yeon felt a growing urge to expand her horizons. She’d long been fascinated by Scottish textiles—tartan, tweed, the bold patterns of Highland rugs—and dreamed of merging them with hanji. “I wanted to see what would happen when two ancient craft traditions talked to each other,” she says. In 2012, she applied for a residency at Edinburgh’s Edinburgh College of Art, one of the UK’s top art schools. The application process was daunting: she had to submit a portfolio of her hanji work and a proposal for a project that blended Korean and Scottish crafts. One interviewer asked, “Won’t combining these materials feel forced? Is this just a ‘cultural gimmick’?”
Ji-Yeon didn’t flinch. She brought a sample of her work—a hanji lantern woven with Scottish wool—to the interview, explaining how the wool added warmth to the paper’s fragility, just as Scottish culture had added depth to her own identity. “Craft isn’t a gimmick,” she said. “It’s how we tell our stories. This lantern isn’t just Korean or Scottish—it’s both. It’s about belonging to two places.” She got the residency, but the doubt stayed with her: would the UK art world ever see her work as more than a “foreign curiosity”?
Fighting for Recognition in a “Craft vs. Art” World
Ji-Yeon’s first year in Edinburgh was lonely and frustrating. She rented a tiny studio in a former warehouse, where she spent hours experimenting with hanji and Scottish materials—dyeing hanji with heather from the Pentland Hills, weaving it with tweed scraps from a Glasgow factory, even embedding bits of sea glass from Edinburgh’s Portobello Beach into her pieces. But when she tried to exhibit her work, galleries turned her down. “They’d say, ‘This is beautiful craft, but we show fine art,’” she remembers. One gallery director even told her, “Korean paper art is lovely for festivals, but it’s not ‘serious’ enough for our space.”
The rejection stung, but Ji-Yeon refused to change her vision. She started hosting small exhibitions in her studio, inviting locals, other artists, and even tourists to see her work. She’d give tours, explaining the history of hanji and how she blended it with Scottish materials. “I wanted people to understand that craft is art,” she says. “Every stitch, every tear of paper, every choice of color has meaning.” Slowly, word spread. A local art critic visited her studio and wrote a glowing review in The Edinburgh Evening News, calling her work “a radical reimagining of what fiber art can be—cultural, emotional, and unapologetically human.”
In 2015, Ji-Yeon got her first big break: the Edinburgh Art Festival invited her to create an installation for their annual showcase. She spent three months working on “Highland Hanji,” a 10-foot-tall sculpture made of layered hanji dyed in the greens and browns of the Scottish Highlands, woven with wool and dotted with tiny LED lights that mimicked the glow of Scottish lochs at dusk. On opening night, crowds gathered around the piece, some touching the hanji (Ji-Yeon encouraged it—“I want people to feel the art, not just look at it”) and asking about its story. A curator from the Tate Modern was there, and she invited Ji-Yeon to exhibit in a group show the following year. “That night, I called my grandmother in Seoul and told her,” Ji-Yeon says, her voice softening. “She said, ‘I knew hanji would take you far. It carries our stories, even across oceans.’”
Weaving a Legacy of Cultural Connection
Since then, Ji-Yeon’s career has soared. Her 2018 series “Tartan and Hanji: Threads of Two Homes”—which paired traditional Scottish tartan patterns with hanji cutouts—was exhibited at the National Galleries of Scotland, making her one of the few Asian artists to have a solo show there. In 2020, she created “Lockdown Weavings,” a collection of small hanji and wool pieces that captured the loneliness and hope of the COVID-19 pandemic; the series was bought by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London for their permanent collection.
But Ji-Yeon hasn’t forgotten the struggles she faced. She now runs a yearly workshop at Edinburgh College of Art called “Craft as Storytelling,” where she teaches young artists—many of them Asian immigrants—to use their cultural crafts in their work. “I tell them, ‘Don’t hide your heritage to fit in,’” she says. “Your culture is your superpower. It’s what makes your art unique.” She also works with local Scottish schools, teaching kids to make simple hanji crafts and explaining Korean culture—“to build bridges, one piece of paper at a time.”
In 2022, Ji-Yeon was awarded a prestigious Creative Scotland grant to work on her most ambitious project yet: “Transcontinental Threads,” a series of large-scale installations that blend hanji with materials from across the world (silk from India, linen from France, cotton from the US) but always include a Scottish wool element. “I want to show that we’re all connected through craft,” she says. “No matter where we’re from, we all tell stories with our hands.”
Today, Ji-Yeon’s studio is a hub of creativity. She shares it with two other artists—one Scottish, one Indian—and they often collaborate on projects. On a crisp autumn morning, she’s working on a piece for “Transcontinental Threads,” adding strands of Scottish wool to a sheet of hanji dyed with indigo (a nod to both Korean and Scottish indigo traditions). Her 6-year-old daughter, Soo-Jin, sits on the floor beside her, tearing small pieces of hanji and gluing them to a piece of paper. “She’s my biggest critic,” Ji-Yeon laughs. “Yesterday, she told me my wool was ‘too scratchy’—so I used softer wool today.”
Ji-Yeon looks around her studio, at the shelves filled with hanji, the baskets of Scottish wool, the photos of her grandmother and her daughter side by side. “When I first moved here, I worried I’d lose my Korean identity,” she says. “But art taught me that I don’t have to choose. I can be Korean and Scottish, a craftsperson and an artist, a daughter and a mother—all at once. My art is the thread that holds it all together.”
She picks up a small piece of hanji and wool from her workbench, holding it up to the light. The hanji glows softly, the wool adds a warm texture, and together, they look like a little piece of both Seoul and Edinburgh. “This is what I’ve always wanted,” she says. “To make art that feels like home—for me, and for anyone who’s ever felt like they belong to two places.”