Kakyoung Lee

Kakyoung Lee is a South Korean-born, New York-based artist whose practice integrates printmaking, animation, and installation around the formal and political problem of the moving printed image. She studied printmaking at Hong-Ik University, Seoul, completing both her B.F.A. and M.F.A., and then earned a second M.F.A. from SUNY Purchase College in New York. The two-degree route between Seoul and New York is the structuring fact of her career: her work attends explicitly to the immigrant experience of moving between two home countries, and she treats the print's capacity to be reprinted, layered, and re-erased as a medium for that movement.

Her signature method composes hundreds of hand-drawn images and individual prints into stop-motion animations that reproduce the rhythms of ordinary urban life — pedestrians on a Brooklyn sidewalk, a child riding a bike, a roomful of dancers — and simultaneously hold those rhythms in suspension. Major early animation print series include 'Day Series' (2007, 80 drypoint prints), 'Family Portrait' (2009, 157 drypoint prints), 'Untitled – Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn' (2009, 156 drypoint prints), 'Walk 2010' (198 drypoint prints), 'Dance, Dance, Dance' (2011, 342 drypoint prints), and 'Hana's Ride' (2014, 327 drypoint prints). Each set is at once an animation when projected and a sequential print suite when shown unanimated.

From roughly 2018, Lee broadened the project to address contemporary social crises. The 'Smoke Series' (2018-19) responds to climate-driven wildfire imagery through 100-120 charcoal drawings; the 'Barbed Wire Series' (2018) uses offset lithography on BFK paper; 'Tangled' (2019) is a small set of woodcut prints on Hanji, the Korean mulberry paper. The COVID-era 'Passersby Series' (2022) extends the animation format to 46 drypoint prints and 100 monotype prints with coffee, addressing the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States. The 'Another Beginning' series (2023) — including 'We Must Be Still and Still Moving,' a four-print reductive woodcut on mulberry paper — marks her most direct engagement with East Asian woodblock heritage.

Lee's prints and animations are held in the public collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Asia Society Museum (New York), the McNay Art Museum (Texas), the Cleveland Museum of Art (Ohio), and the Jeju 4.3 Memorial in Jeju, South Korea — the last commemorating victims of the 1948 Jeju Uprising. She has exhibited at the Drawing Center, the Lower East Side Print Shop, the Queens Museum, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the Seoul Arts Center, among many other venues. Her solo exhibition 'Transitions: Recent Prints and Animations by Kakyoung Lee' opened at the List Gallery, Swarthmore College in September 2025; she was concurrently included in 'Shaping Identity: Korean Print in Diaspora' at Atlanta Contemporary (September-December 2025).

Her awards include two Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants (2010, 2023), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, a NYFA Fellowship, an AHL Foundation grant, and the KAFA Award. She has held residencies at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, Art Omi, the International Studio & Curatorial Program, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She is now an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts Boston and an instructor of the Reductive Woodcut Course at the Lower East Side Printshop.

Within the contemporary diaspora-print field, Lee's practice exemplifies how printmaking remains a generative medium for first-generation immigrant artists working through questions of visibility, surveillance, and accumulated time. Her engagement with woodcut on Hanji from 2019 forward and her teaching of reductive woodcut at LES Printshop represent an explicit choice to ground her time-based image practice in the durable traditions of Korean and East Asian relief printmaking — including the use of mulberry paper that forms the substrate of mokuhanga and traditional Korean woodblock print. Her work is a key reference point for the Korean-American printmaking diaspora's recent expansion into video, animation, and large-scale installation.