Bridge between two cultures
- Song Yi was born in South Korea
- She came to Brussels to study bookbinding
- She uses traditional Korean lacquering techniques
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.”
Discover her work
INTERVIEW
Bookbinding and lacquering are two crafts that live in tradition. But the uniting of the two seems to me a new thing.
Nature. For example the way leaves fall from trees, decompose and disappear, after which new leaves grow. My approach to bookbinding is strongly influenced by this rhythm of nature. I follow it and participate in it with my actions that are repeated and accumulate.
In the creative process, all steps have their own meaning. I like the actions and the breathing that flow from them. There is repetition, but not routine. This way, I can enter a kind of meditative state and feel out of time.
In the industrial era, bookbinding became something for collectors or bibliophiles. This is less so today thanks to collaborations with different kinds of artists. The dematerialisation of the book in a digital world also reinforces the work of bookbinders.
