What Goes Around
Words by Rachel Summer Small
Photography by Guno Lee
Picture this: A mother and a son sit side by side at home in a land far away, she at her canvas, he with pencils and paper. Years go by, and the child grows up to be a famous furniture and object designer with a big studio in New York. When the time is right, he brings his mother to the States, along with her paintings, and the pair collaborate on a two-person show. It turns out, her work is finally a hit, too.
It’s a touching coming-of-age story, and it’s been real life for Minjae Kim and his mother, Myoung-Ae Lee. At 36, he fondly remembers his youth in South Korea surrounded by creativity. “We were always drawing,” he says. His mother, now 69, agrees, recounting a trip to Paris when her son was 6. “We took notebooks with us and drew on the go. We visited all the art museums, like the Picasso Museum and the Musée d’Orsay, iconic places,” she says, a smile forming at the memory. “When we came back, I saw that his drawings had changed so much.”
Another time, Lee recalls giving an elementary school-aged Kim the rectangular boxes from her oil-paint packaging. In Seoul, over a Zoom call with her son at his apartment in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, her dark, layered hair swishes around her neck as she proudly displays what he made all those years ago: It’s a Tetris-like configuration with a girl’s head jutting out on an overhanging edge at the top, and her body, clad in a flower T-shirt and jeans, tucked around the rest of the boxes, the elbows, hips, and knees falling neatly into corners. The craft demonstrates a rather sophisticated sense of composition for one so young.
In the mid-aughts, Kim left home for the United States, first community college in Seattle and then the University of Washington before bouncing to the East Coast for Columbia University’s graduate architecture program. After earning his master’s he landed at Studio Giancarlo Valle in New York, where he discovered permission to break away from more academic ideas in his practice. Over the course of the pandemic, Kim decided to set out on his own, leaving architecture and re-establishing himself in the realm of design.
Tall and thin, with shoulder-length hair that he usually wears pulled back and a preference for head-to-toe black, he certainly looks the part of a sought-after New York City designer, complete with an air of mystery. His aesthetic, too, is a bit of an enigma, refusing any easily named shapes and sticking to simple, natural colors. Contemplating what intrigues him about design, he brings up world-building and a return to storytelling, and with it a rejection of mid-century Modernist dogma.
This motivation has become more articulated in recent shows: His solo exhibition at Marta gallery in Los Angeles last year, “Phantom–22,” was inspired by an infamous mountain lion that roamed Griffith Park from 2012 up to its death in 2022. Objects on display included a large wooden beast and a smaller resin version, plus a skunk sculpture. Meanwhile, Hollywood nostalgia came through with off-white quilted-fiberglass sculptures of palm trees as well as an old-fashioned luxury car. Later that year, a presentation in Seoul unfolded with a crowd of identical dark-wood chairs and standing lights, accompanied by photographs showing iconic views of the cityscape, an homage to the capital and its history.
Decades earlier, Lee always had bigger dreams for her paintings, which started out as representational still lifes (flowers in vases, etc.) with expressive surface textures; she had been placing them in group shows as far back as 1982. While she’d been interested in art since childhood, she’d felt pressure to go to a vocational high school and had assumed that the role of artist was “reserved for immensely gifted people,” as she says. But, by her twenties, night classes and a stint in interior design brought her to a realization: “If I did something I loved, I was no longer afraid of the outcome.”
“If I did something I loved, I was no longer afraid of the outcome.”
— Myoung-Ae Lee
In the mid-1990s, just as Kim was entering fourth grade, his mother was beginning a master’s program at Keimyung University in Daegu. “My summers were just hanging out in the grad school studio with all of her classmates,” he remembers. “I tried printmaking; somebody who was a sculptor made molds for me for silicone trinkets, Pokémon, things like that.” Just under three years later, they graduated on the same day in 2000: Lee with her MFA and Kim from the sixth grade, though he had to leave the event early to make it to his mom’s commencement.
As her son began high school, Lee continued evolving, too. Since the turn of the millennium, her paintings have transformed into enticing abstractions still sporting distinctive textures, built up with paint as well as bits of paper and fabric. “If we express a piece of fabric or thread as an object, it is just a material at the time,” she explains. “But depending on where it goes in my works, it changes.” Another key component of her practice is her use of free-form canvases, which break from the traditional rectangle to complement and enhance certain compositions. “We all exist together, but we all have different characters,” says Lee. “I think it’s an expression of that.” Many of her paintings feature repeating squares or circles, while others experiment with larger geometric shapes, often rendered to seem as if they’re jutting outward. This optical effect is heightened by some canvases that she thickens with a layer of foam covered by plaster or paper, so that the works subtly protrude from the wall.
Though she went on to have more than a dozen exhibitions clustered between South Korea and Germany between 2001 and 2021, and even completed her PhD in fine art from Won-kwang University in 2016, Lee received little wider industry recognition. “I always had this feeling she was on the cusp of it happening,” says Kim of his mom’s career. He still carries some guilt, he admits, recognizing how the daily demands and financial stress of raising him limited her growth. “So I wanted to give that momentum back to her as soon as I had a chance.”
It was out of such reverence for his mom’s journey that Kim brought her—along with a selection of her paintings—to New York City in 2022. The exhibition, a dual show at Matter Gallery that combined his eclectic furniture with Lee’s wall-works, marked her United States debut. It was also the first time the two saw their work side by side. Following the installation, the pair had dinner, and afterward, while walking alone, Kim found himself tearing up. “It felt like I made a mark in our personal narrative,” he says.
Soon, Lee’s work began gaining more traction. In the spring of 2024, her son landed a monthlong residency at the city’s Ace Hotel just as she was set to show new paintings at the New Art Dealers Alliance New York art fair in May. So, as Kim lived in the hotel for all of April, she lived in his apartment, and they worked alongside each other in his Brooklyn studio. “I really enjoyed working with you,” Lee says to her son over the camera, with one of her paintings visible behind her—a massive, light brown expanse textured with scratch-like white lines. “I feel proud about sharing the same creative world, even though it’s in a slightly different field.”
Of course, the mother-son dynamic begs comparisons between Lee’s earthy abstractions and Kim’s dreamy, even surrealist, neutral-toned designs in unconventional shapes. They both clearly appreciate the raw power of a natural, bare-bones color palette combined with geometric arrangements that can appear spare yet not at all minimalist. Like a quiet breath at twilight.
As for Kim, the unusual forms he designs are often slapped with the “organic” label, an easy one-off adjective that fits their sensuous, irregularly curving lines and frequent animal motifs (a crowd favorite is a chair with a bunny-ears-shaped back). But there are plenty of sharp edges and right angles, too. Take a backgammon table, cast out of resin (a private commission soon on its way out of his studio): From one side to the other, a rectangular half morphs into an uneven semicircular shape. The use of quilted fiber-glass—his original invention—across countless lighting fixtures, vessels, and furniture items creates flesh-colored semitransparent and highly textured surfaces, so even pieces with more traditional silhouettes have fuzzy outlines, the material bumpy and puckering. His Freud Chair from 2021, for instance, borrows the contours of the psychoanalyst’s office armchair but with its back and armrests recreated with the gossamer-looking fiberglass, supported by a heavy mahogany seat and legs. Overall, the impression is less one-note, and instead more like the spirit of a natural, “organic” entity punching its way out of a Modernist, Western cage.
As a visual metaphor for Kim’s creative impetus, that isn’t so far off. He has a love-hate relationship with the mid-century modern design ethos, reserving particular distaste for the architectural International Style—influenced by urban-planning intellectuals like Le Corbusier—that scorned decoration and prioritized functionality to such an extreme degree that it lost sight of how humans might actually feel in such stark environments. Still, when Kim first learned about Modernist styles in school, with all of their categorically rational underpinnings, it seemed to make sense. “You’re like, Oh my God, this is the way,” he describes, recalling how the academic principles seemed sound. Only later in his life did he connect the on-paper theory to the neighborhoods he grew up in in Seoul and Daejeon, which, like so many postwar housing developments around the world, looked to Le Corbusier’s “Radiant Cities” as a template. Envisioned as utopias by ivory tower types, this type of plan produced soaring, identical residential high-rises spread across wide grassy areas, with zero mixed-use space and little wiggle room for any city-living dynamism. “It always felt off to me, and now I know why,” says Kim of such accommodations. “I point my finger at this moment, and it’s frustrating.”
Today, the designer’s Bushwick studio is warm and a little chaotic, his designs lining narrow walkways. Soft yellow lighting comes from an overhanging fixture attached to a long bamboo pole, which balances on a small wood block jutting out of a column. There is a chessboard table he made during the Ace residency, which comes with unique pieces, tiny statues each with their own character—angels, ghosts, winged fiends. A few feet away, I catch a glimpse of a table prototype commissioned by the New Museum for the restaurant that will debut with its post-renovation reopening: simple, smooth wood, and a tabletop with curving corners, exactly between square and circle. There are touches of humor, too, like a skull-shaped knob on a door that leads to space where Kim and his assistants get down to the heavy-duty technical work of sawing wood or casting resin or fiberglassing, which can result in not-so-breathable air (hence, the skull). And it’s impossible to miss a number of Lee’s paintings across the walls: One wing-like canvas is painted brown with lighter flecks suggesting feathers. In another, various flowing shapes, distinguished by different colors and patterns, overlap and intersect, like scarves floating in the water.
The mingling of the mother’s and son’s works in his studio so far from where he grew up yet close to his heart is less a conclusion to their story as it is a sign of things just beginning. After all, with both hard at work on opposite sides of the globe, Kim credits Lee with the sort of work ethic that comes with a fundamental belief in what he’s making. “I learned from her this kind of rigor, and the mentality of keeping the integrity of the work, because she’s very serious about it,” he says. “That can be taken for granted, but it’s actually so big.” Early in his career, he recalls, “I was like, This is great. I can do this. But three, four, five years on, you start to have more existential questions, and I realized the importance of keeping myself delusional enough to keep going, knowing that she’s done it for 30, 40 years. It was a long, lonely journey.” That inner drive kept Lee on track, and Kim is following her model. “She’s the one who established that identity of, I’m an artist, and I’ll find the ways to make it work.” And so they have.
