Everything started for Song Yi Han during a bookbinding workshop in her native city, the South Korean capital, Seoul. “The touch of paper gave me a great feeling. I realised that this was what I wanted to do in life.” The experience led her to Brussels, where she followed bookbinding studies. She then won a competition for art school graduates in Belgium, which helped her to set up a workshop with bookbinding machines: “Cast iron machines more than a century old, that I purchased from a bookbinder who was stopping his own activities.” Song Yi also looked for additional methods, which she found in her native country. She started to use traditional South Korean lacquering techniques. “This way, I created a bridge between my native and adopted culture.”
Song Yi Han
